Arts And Science Research

Vanderbilt biologists Nicole Creanza and Kerri-Ann Anderson have developed a new mathematical model, rooted in cultural evolution, that represents vaccine hesitancy as a belief that can influence, but not perfectly predict, whether parents will decide to vaccinate their children. Read More

Vanderbilt researchers Amanda Lea and Wenhan Zhu have been named 2023 Pew Biomedical Scholars. The Pew Scholars Program in the Biomedical Sciences provides funding to young investigators of outstanding promise in science relevant to the advancement of human health. Read More

The National Science Foundation has selected 28 Vanderbilt students for its 2023 Graduate Research Fellowship Program. Read More

Vanderbilt University has created the Future of Learning and Generative AI Initiative and appointed members of an advisory board. Both will center their efforts around scholarship and opportunities connected to the growing use of nascent artificial intelligence technologies.  Read More

Thirteen outstanding faculty members from across the university have been selected for the 2023 cohort of Chancellor Faculty Fellows. The group is composed of highly accomplished, recently tenured faculty from a wide variety of disciplines and areas of expertise.   Read More

Vanderbilt's Assistant Professor of History, Meng Zhang, has been awarded a stipend from the National Endowment for the Humanities for her intriguing research into the historical and societal implications of the edible bird's nest trade between China and maritime Asia. Read More

A National Endowment for the Humanities grant awarded to Vanderbilt’s Angela Sutton, assistant dean for graduate education and strategic initiatives in the College of Arts and Science, will help fund the excavation of a historic Nashville neighborhood and a collection of the oral histories of the neighborhood’s descendants. Read More

Jefferson Cowie, a celebrated U.S. politics and culture historian, has won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for his book that “radically shifts our understanding of what freedom means in America.” Read More

The cultural evolution of a population depends not only on size but also on the degree of specialization within a population, according to a new study published last month by a team of scientists including Nicole Creanza. The study found that populations can increase their cultural repertoire by subdividing knowledge into smaller groups, but the total group must be sufficiently large for specialization to be advantageous. Read More

A new study led by members of Ann Tate’s lab found evidence that pleiotropy may slow down evolution of genes involved in immunity. Read More

Tennessee’s open COVID testing policy reduced actual COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations and deaths. Costs of expanded testing were so low that essentially any reduction in the number of deaths due to the policy would justify its cost. Read More

Graduate student Reese Martin and his doctoral advisor, Ann Tate, assistant professor of biological sciences, used theoretical modeling to identify a potential relationship between genetic pleiotropy and the evolution of immune responses. Read More

Led by Vanderbilt University School of Medicine Basic Sciences professor Hassane Mchaourab, the Center for Applied Artificial Intelligence in Protein Dynamics will focus on the application of machine learning techniques to understand how proteins work. Read More

Research from Associate Professor of Medical and Linguistic Anthropology T.S. Harvey demonstrates how a disease’s name can have a significant impact on the public’s perception, attitude and behavior toward the disease. Harvey argues that disease names should be selected with careful consideration of their potential impacts on public health from the framing of risk perceptions through the circulation of harmful misinformation. Read More

Sarah Worthan, along with Robert McCarthy and Megan Behringer, led a new effort to understand the effects of the environment on the outcome of experimental evolution studies. Read More

Stephen Ferguson, first-author of a new paper with his postdoctoral advisor, Laurence Zwiebel, along with two undergraduates associated with the lab, Isaac Bakis and Nicholas Edwards, confirmed the existence of a specialized soldier caste within an ant species. Read More

Scientists from Vanderbilt and UCAS made a breakthrough in single-atom vibrational spectroscopy in graphene, crucial to understanding materials’ thermal properties and nanophotonics. Read More

Paul C. Taylor, W. Alton Jones Professor and professor of philosophy, has received an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant to seek out patterns in the way people and organizations think about equity, diversity and inclusion, which can impact EDI interventions. Read More

By Jenna Somers Cynthia Brame, Heather Johnson, Cristina Zepeda Vanderbilt researchers in the College of Arts and Science and Peabody College of education and human development recently received a three-year grant exceeding $280,000 from the National Science Foundation to collaborate on a study aimed at improving equity… Read More

The Fisk-Vanderbilt Master’s-to-Ph.D. Bridge Program, a partnership to create equitable pathways to STEM, has been awarded a Sloan Foundation grant for the first U.S. graduate certificate course in multi-messenger astronomy.  Read More