Sloan Foundation awards Vanderbilt’s Alexandre Tiriac prestigious research fellowship
Feb. 18, 2025—While he was cooking dinner, phone in hand, Alexandre Tiriac noticed an email from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The organization—a grantmaking institution founded in 1934 by industrialist Alfred P. Sloan Jr.—had written to tell him he’d been selecte...
Meet Vanderbilt’s first Packard Fellow Carlos Taboada, assistant professor of biological sciences and frog whisperer
Oct. 28, 2024—Carlos Taboada, assistant professor of biological sciences, was among the 2024 Packard Fellows for Science and Engineering announced on Tuesday, Oct. 15. At the Taboada Lab, he and his team investigate the chemical, physiological and physical mechanism...
Vanderbilt researchers find warming quickens aging-related mortality in mosquitoes
Sep. 26, 2024—New research shows that warming and aging act as a one-two punch, lowering mosquito lifespans and fanning the flames of bacterial infections. These findings highlight how climate change could alter the risks of disease spread by mosquitoes.
Heard that Bird: Creanza Lab develops free curriculum to teach birdsong identification
Jul. 2, 2024—The Creanza Lab, along with alumnus Matt Wilkins, BA’06, created a birdsong identification lesson plan for middle and high school students. The game show lets participants identify which birds they can hear in various pop culture media, such as movies,...
Graduate Student Council announces 2024 Anchor Award winners
Jun. 17, 2024—The Vanderbilt Graduate Student Council has announced the winners of the 2024 Graduate Leadership Anchor Awards, honoring the hard work and leadership of Vanderbilt graduate students schoolwide. This year’s awards recognize outstanding service, mentors...
Vanderbilt scientists develop an algae time machine, advancing biomedicine
May. 14, 2024—A Vanderbilt scientific team has succeeded in adjusting the daily biological clock of cyanobacteria, making the blue-green algae a more prolific producer of renewable fuels, chemicals, and pharmaceuticals, like insulin.
Illuminating a critical step in initiating DNA replication in eukaryotes
Mar. 26, 2024—The research teams of Brandt Eichman, Professor and Chair of Biological Sciences and Professor of Biochemistry, and Walter Chazin, Professor of Biochemistry, worked together to understand how DNA replication is initiated in eukaryotes. Using Vanderbilt’s state-of-the-art instrumentation in the Center for Structural Biology’s Cryo-Electron Microscopy Facility, Eichman, Chazin, and their colleagues provided detailed visualizations of DNA...
Breaking the Mold: Kyle David’s research challenges ecological norms in yeast communities
Mar. 7, 2024—Kyle David, an NSF postdoctoral fellow in the Rokas lab, and co-authors published a new paper, “Saccharomycotina yeasts defy longstanding macroecological patterns” in the high-impact journal PNAS. This paper, which looks at the ecology of 186 species o...
Vanderbilt University biologists discover that rising temperature accelerates aging in mosquitoes, weakening their immune system
Jan. 26, 2024—A study by Vanderbilt biology graduate student Lindsay Martin and Centennial Professor of Biological Sciences Julián Hillyer found that mosquitoes age more quickly when temperatures are higher. This aging, in turn, weakens the mosquito immune system an...
New collaborative research project seeks improved treatment for cystic fibrosis
Nov. 16, 2023—Lars Plate, assistant professor of chemistry and biological sciences, has received a $2.76 million collaborative grant to investigate medical therapy for people with cystic fibrosis. The interdisciplinary project brings together teams with varied exper...