Vanderbilt Magazine

María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Cornelius Vanderbilt Professor of Art, has been named the 2024 SEC Faculty Achievement Award winner from Vanderbilt University. Her artistic work spans a variety of media, including photography, performance, sculpture, drawing, painting and video. She employs them in immersive installations that explore her experience as a Cuban woman and the broader issues facing Caribbean people, including displacement and inequality. Read More

Reese Animashaun, Maddy Bowser, Taryn DeWese, Hailee Mack, Giovanna Mason and Rachel Ogunleye are the first new volleyball Commodores. Head coach Anders Nelson and assistant coaches Lauren Plum and Russell Corbelli worked together to recruit Vanderbilt’s first class for volleyball since the program was paused in 1980. Read More

Chris Lowry, BMus’11, and Peter Dayton, BMus’12, both received recognition in the American Viola Society’s 2024 biennial Maurice Gardner Competition for Composers. Among the 77 submissions to the contest, Chris Lowry was the first prize winner, with his work, “Zenith (for Jackson)” for viola and electronics. Read More

Alumni wrote in to tell us about their favorite professors. Read More

The complete archive of Vanderbilt University’s flagship publication has been fully digitized and is now available online, making more than a century of university history accessible to the Vanderbilt community and others around the globe. The digitization project, led by the Jean and Alexander Heard Libraries’ Special Collections and University Archives, includes publishing the complete run of Vanderbilt Magazine and its predecessor, Vanderbilt Alumnus, on the JSTOR digital library of academic journals, books and primary sources. Read More

Some have said that singer Dashon Burton’s bass-baritone is enormous, capable of raising the dead or like looking directly into the sun. This year, the two-time Grammy winner is nominated once again with vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth in the Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance category for their album Rough Magic (New Amsterdam Records, 2023). Read More

Vanderbilt University Press has launched a new trade series, Global Black Writers in Translation, which will publish a variety of texts by authors of African descent translated from their source languages into English. The goal is to amplify a body of writing that introduces anglophone readers to the range and complexity of Black literary and cultural production, history and political thought. Read More

Mohamed Abdel-Kader, MEd'04, is the chief innovation officer and executive director of the Innovation, Technology and Research Hub at the multi-billion-dollar U.S. Agency for International Development, where he enjoys solving real problems creatively while making the most of U.S. aid. Read More

Avery Carpenter Forrey, BA'11, says Vanderbilt was the first place where she felt she could make a career out of writing. With a double major in in English and communications, her latest writing journey has led to the publication of her novel 'Social Engagement' (Mariner, 2023). Read More

Dennis G. Hall, Vanderbilt’s first associate provost and later vice provost for research, dean emeritus of the Graduate School, professor emeritus of physics and professor emeritus of electrical engineering and computer science, died Jan. 6 in Nashville. Read More

Rich Hull, BA'92, and his wife, Kelly, have created the Vanderbilt In Hollywood Internship Endowment, a need-based scholarship that supports students with cost of living expenses during the ViH summer program.  Read More

Bryan Deaner, MBA’93, has made a multi-layered gift to the Owen Graduate School of Management that includes a bequest to ultimately support the Deaner Creativity Scholarship for students there. His gift also incorporates current-use funding for scholarships at Owen through a matching gift program with his employer for additional support.   Read More

For Victor Czerkasij (pronounced chur’ ka-see) and his wife, Rene, Ukraine was the land of his parents and ancestors, and it was supposed to be the site of their 40th wedding anniversary vacation. Then the war came.   And the effects of that war… Read More

Many families have beloved recipes they pass down from generation to generation. Suzanne Rich Miller, BA'80, and Anne Miller Morris, BS'06, have parlayed a simple salad dressing created by matriarch Anne Arnold Rich (mother to Suzanne and grandmother of Anne) into a growing, woman-owned business.  Read More

Aisha Francis, president and CEO of Boston’s Benjamin Franklin Cummings Institute of Technology in 2021, is among the Boston Globe’s 50 Tech Power Players for 2023. With graduate degrees from Vanderbilt in English, she sought a path that was “both optimistic and realistic,” that could lead to nontraditional academic roles. Read More

A landmark gift from current Vanderbilt parents Allison and Larry Berg will establish the Berg Global Artist-in-Residence program to bring visiting artists to campus, as well as two Berg Dean’s Faculty Fellowships in the College of Arts and Science. Read More

Now in their 51st year on campus, 13 courageous African American students came together during the fall of 1972 to charter the first Black sorority at Vanderbilt University and what was then called George Peabody College for Teachers. Read More

After long careers designing power generation plants and acute care medical facilities, Scott Johnson, BE'87, made a career leap two years ago to take the top job at the nation’s largest pencil maker, Musgrave Pencil Company.  Read More

To mark Vanderbilt's Sesquicentennial year, the 100th anniversary of the passing of E.E. Barnard (Vanderbilt Observatory's first director) and the 70th anniversary of Dyer Observatory, Billy Teets, current director of Dyer, offers his advice on how to become as passionate about the stars as Barnard was. Read More

School of Engineering alumnus Olatunde Osinaike is one of five winners of the 2022 National Poetry Series. His debut collection, 'Tender Headed,' is being published by Akashic Press in December. He will be on campus for an alumni reading event Oct. 24, co-sponsored by the Vanderbilt Creative Writing Program and the Bishop Joseph Johnson Black Cultural Center. He returns to Nashville Jan. 25, 2024, for a reading with The Porch, a literary nonprofit. Read More