School Of Medicine Basic Sciences

Postdocs Andrew Rice and Yanqing Xue, in the biochemistry lab of Professor Doug Mitchell, discovered which enzyme is responsible for a rare chemical modification that doesn’t exist in human cells. That could be crucial for developing antibiotics that can target bacteria while leaving human hosts’ cells completely alone. Read More

PFAS, or “forever chemicals,” have already been linked to disruptions in thyroid hormones, among other detrimental health effects. A recent paper by first author Heather Hartmann, a Ph.D. student in the lab of Associate Professor Vivian Weiss, dug into thyroid cell behavior under long-term exposure to PFAS. It finds that the chemicals alter cellular function, including signaling pathways that are involved in cancer. “We hope [this] can help people who are already at risk for thyroid cancer … make better-informed choices, as consumers, to limit exposure to these chemicals,” Hartmann said. Read More

Graduate and professional students share how they've become more of the person they want to be while at Vanderbilt. Read More

Read what inspires and motivates these graduate and professional students to make a positive impact. Read More

For centuries, the human brain has intrigued scientists and philosophers alike. It stores our memories and shapes our behavior—the center of learning, emotion and identity. Yet even after decades of research, much about how the brain works remains a mystery. “People have been fascinated with questions of how you learn and who you are—philosophical questions that all come back to processes in the brain,” says Lisa Monteggia, Lee E. Limbird Professor in Pharmacology and the Barlow Family Director of the Vanderbilt Brain Institute. Now neuroscience is at a watershed moment, with new tools poised to dramatically expand understanding of the central nervous system.   Read More

Everything you touch was developed by basic science, says Ian Macara, chair of the Department of Cell and Developmental Biology. From food varieties and new crops, to your phone, your computer and the plastics we use every day, everything originally came out of a basic research lab. Macara's department, within the School of Medicine Basic Sciences, aims to train the next generation of scientists to advance basic biomedical research at the cellular, molecular and organismal levels. Read More

Gentle caress, searing burn, jolting shock. All these are possible with the elemental power of touch. Read how Shan Meltzer studies touch from the cellular level through the nervous system to the brain, to find better ways to treat pain and physical injuries. Read More

Vanderbilt’s undergraduate, graduate and professional schools are taking on the challenges of an ever-evolving world with dozens of new courses and programs for the 2026–27 school year. Here are some of the new academic ways the university is preparing students to combine knowledge and vision to create future impact. Read More

Vanderbilt researchers are hunting down ways to combat Alzheimer’s by developing compounds that affect the proteins that are linked to it. TAOK-1 is such a protein, but it has not been thoroughly studied because there wasn’t a “tool compound” to study it with. Former postdoctoral fellow Daniel Schultz and Ph.D. student Lauren Parr have developed two such compounds—one that inhibits TAOK-1, and another that activates the entire TAOK protein family—through work conducted in the WCNDD, led by Executive Director Craig Lindsley. Read More

Think of cells as factories that hold sets of machines doing different things. How those machines are organized and used determines the efficiency of the factory. Vanderbilt researchers are looking into how cells reorganize those machines over time—and what that means for aging. They’re focused on a cell structure (machine) called the ER, which is known to be vital to cell processes but has not yet been thoroughly studied. “Changes in the ER occur relatively early in the aging process,” says Assistant Professor Kris Burkewitz. “One of the most exciting implications of this is that it may be one of the triggers for what comes later: dysfunction and disease.” And identifying the trigger could lead to being able to stop the firing. Read More

For patients with advanced melanoma without BRAF mutation who no longer respond to immune checkpoint inhibitors, treatment options remain frustratingly limited. A new study from Vanderbilt researchers led by Professor Emerita of Pharmacology Ann Richmond outlines a promising therapeutic strategy that may re-sensitize these resistant tumors to immunotherapy. Read More

Vanderbilt University has announced its fall 2025 recipients of the Seeding Success, Scaling Success and Rapid-Advancement MicroGrant Program awards, providing internal funding to help faculty launch new research directions, strengthen proposals and compete for major external grants. Read More

Research into combating cocaine addiction has been limited by the difficulty in structuring accurate animal models; standard practice relies on implanting IV catheters that the animals can use to self-dose. Now Assistant Professor Cody Siciliano's lab has devised a method that more closely mimics cocaine use in humans—effectively, a way for the animals to snort cocaine. This makes the animal model more analogous to human experience, and it reduces surgical and intravenous procedures for the animals. "This model provides a powerful framework for linking motivated drug use with real-time neural activity, offering new opportunities to study the circuitry underlying reinforcement and decision-making," Siciliano said. Read More

New drug discovery institute brings together AI, genomics, systems biology and translational research to accelerate cures for major diseases. Read More

A new potential treatment for schizophrenia discovered through the Warren Center for Neuroscience Drug Discovery has entered phase 1 clinical trials, marking the fifth WCNDD therapeutic to advance into human testing. Read More

Schizophrenia has been proven to be heritable, but typical analyses so far haven’t been able to pinpoint what, genetically, is going wrong in the brain. A new paper by Professor Bingshan Li and research instructor Rui Chen outlines how to improve on existing genetic screening for schizophrenia risk by expanding the areas of the chromosome scanned for genetic signals. Their results point to a “tangible biological pathway—and potential treatment target—linking genetic risk to the pathogenesis of schizophrenia,” Chen said. Read More

Shan Meltzer has been awarded a prestigious Edward Mallinckrodt, Jr. Foundation Award to advance her pioneering research that seeks to determine how the body’s sensory circuits form and function. Her work seeks to answer a fundamental question in neuroscience: how do the brain and spinal cord organize their intricate networks to perform such a wide range of functions? Read More

Vanderbilt supports new faculty every step of the way—by connecting them with senior faculty who serve as mentors, observe their classes and provide valuable feedback, and proofread their grant proposals to make them stronger. These professors who joined Vanderbilt in the past few years shed light on how the university has helped them succeed.  Read More

The role of artificial intelligence in drug discovery has been limited by machine learning methods that fail when they encounter chemical structures they weren’t “trained” on. Assistant Professor Benjamin Brown has written a paper suggesting a more targeted approach: using a task-specific model architecture that’s intentionally restricted to learn from a representation of the interaction space between a protein and a drug molecule and be better able to generalize and figure out which compound might best interact with that protein. That’s important, because identifying those compounds early cuts the costs and time involved in developing drugs. Read More

Advanced melanoma can be notoriously resistant to standard immunotherapy, but a new drug combination might hold some hope for patients with this most common form of skin cancer. Professor Emerita of Pharmacology Ann Richmond and her team, in preclinical work, created a “tumor microenvironment more receptive to immune challenge.” The treatment slowed tumor growth, showed stronger immune responses and increased helpful T cells. It could be on a faster-than-typical track to human studies because all the drugs are already involved in other clinical trials. Read More