Research

Vanderbilt University is among the founding members of the Southeast Regional Superintelligence Computing Consortium, announced Oct. 8 by the White House at the Science: A New Golden Age Summit. Read More

The roots of country music are far more multicultural than some think. Hear from hit country songwriter, New York Times-bestselling novelist, and professor of African American and Diaspora Studies Alice Randall about country music’s Black roots. Read More

Between Oct. 15 and Nov. 15, 2026, faculty, staff and postdoctoral fellows who are engaged in sponsored research must complete the updated Research Security for VU Faculty and Staff course in CITI Program. Read More

Seven Vanderbilt researchers have received Innovation Catalyst Fund awards in the June 2026 cycle to advance promising technologies toward commercialization and real-world impact. Read More

Vanderbilt researcher De-en Jiang and collaborators demonstrate a new way to get more energy from sulfur, a low-cost and abundant battery material. Read More

After more than a decade of erosion, support for democracy has stopped falling and begun a modest but widespread recovery across the Americas. The findings are detailed in the 2026 Pulse of Democracy, released today by Vanderbilt University’s Center for Global Democracy and the Kellogg Institute, part of the University of Notre Dame’s Keough School of Global Affairs. Read More

When humans return to the lunar surface in the coming decade, the tools they carry to listen to the earliest echoes of deep space will bear the distinct imprint of Vanderbilt University research and design. Karan Jani, assistant professor of physics and astronomy and of electrical and computer engineering, and founding director of the Vanderbilt Lunar Labs Initiative, is the principal investigator on two new federal awards that will fuel development of the Laser Interferometer Lunar Antenna, a gravitational-wave observatory program for the moon. Read More

Meet some of our inspiring new faculty and hear the reasons they wanted to join the Vanderbilt community. Read More

One year after Vanderbilt launched the university-wide institute dedicated to solving the world’s toughest energy challenges, the Vanderbilt Center for Sustainability, Energy and Climate gathered researchers, industry leaders and policymakers for its first symposium, held Sept. 2-4.  Keynote speakers from a Fortune 500 energy company, a national laboratory and a Tennessee-born solar giant offered a wide-ranging look at meeting rising energy demand while building a resilient grid. Read More

A new pilot program between Vanderbilt University’s Jean and Alexander Heard Libraries and Cambridge University Press will expand Vanderbilt’s Evidence-Based Acquisitions (EBA) ebook agreement with Cambridge to include book publishing opportunities for Vanderbilt authors. Read More

Vanderbilt University researchers are analyzing mineral deposits in Western caves to reconstruct thousands of years of climate and wildfire history. Backed by international and internal grants, the team studies subterranean records to better understand environmental change and climate trends. Read More

This year’s recipient of the Brighter Ventures Student Award is Victoria Howard. Howard is a fifth-year chemical and physical biology Ph.D. student in the lab of Ivelin Georgiev, the Louise B. McGavock Professor and a professor of pathology, microbiology and immunology at the School of Medicine. Read More

New research from Vanderbilt marketing professor Eric VanEpps finds that fast replies can signal future responsiveness, making job seekers and service providers more likely to be hired. Read More

Dewey Data, an academic research platform that provides access to commercial, third-party datasets, is now available to Vanderbilt users, courtesy of the Jean and Alexander Heard Libraries. Dewey Data acts as a central hub where students, faculty and researchers can license and combine premium data from various industry-leading providers through a single, centralized portal. Read More

Vanderbilt’s Center for Technology Transfer and Commercialization closed out fiscal 2025 with a record number of invention disclosures and one of its busiest years for licensing. In FY26, the team raised the bar even higher. In FY26, CTTC processed 267 new invention disclosures, a 16 percent increase over the previous year’s 231. That back-to-back growth signals that Vanderbilt’s high-performance innovation engine is accelerating.   Read More

A new method pioneered by the lab of Professor of Cell and Developmental Biology Ken Lau is poised to make previously inaccessible medical knowledge that has been locked away in old patient samples newly accessible to scientists. Read More

Ela Knapik still remembers the first zebrafish she saw under a microscope—two days old, no bigger than an eyelash, tail wiggling, heart visibly beating. That was more than 20 years ago during her search for a postdoc position. That tiny fish has held her attention ever since and helped unravel many of the biological mysteries she has published about during her professional career. Read More

A new report published by the Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator (VPA) proposes “CityRx,” a system of public pharmacies for New York City, which would combine a “public option” for pharmacies with support for independent pharmacies to restore and improve access to pharmacy services for all New Yorkers. Read More

The Nashville Innovation Alliance has awarded a Vanderbilt University research team a Civic Tech Jam grant. The recognition is part of the Nashville Tech Studio, an initiative that leverages the expertise of universities in Middle Tennessee to pilot and deploy technology-based solutions that address some of Metro Nashville's largest and most complex challenges. The team—Aniruddha Gokhale, professor of computer science, and Yogesh Barve, research scientist, both based in the Vanderbilt Institute for Software Integrated Systems—was one of five selected. Read More

While artificial intelligence can accelerate scientific discovery, moving discoveries toward practical applications still depends on human collaboration. That idea shaped Vanderbilt’s 2026 Life Science Showcase: AI in Translational Research. Read More