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As Vanderbilt students Katie Wong (junior), Ren Adajar (junior) and Christin Ann Sanchez (senior) coasted through the bustle of Ho Chi Minh City on the backs of motorbikes, holding tightly onto their peer tour guides this past May, it was hard to belie... Read More

Engaging in thoughtful dialogue is not only essential in today’s society, but also is a trademark of the Vanderbilt experience, which begins with the first-year experience on The Martha Rivers Ingram Commons. On Sunday, Sept. 14, author Jacqueline Wood... Read More

David Mandrus, University of Tennessee, Knoxville The Search for New materials Although new materials are the engine that drives much of condensed matter physics, the conceptual process by which new materials are discovered is rarely discussed. In this talk, I will present strategies for discovering materials that challenge our physical… Read More

Yang-Ting Chien, Georgia State University Probing the Trillion Degree Little Bang in Heavy Ion Collisions In relativistic collisions of large nuclei, a hot and dense medium referred to as the Quark Gluon Plasma (QGP) can be formed, which explodes and evaporates very soon after collisions. The long-distance behavior of such… Read More

The 2025 Southern Festival of Books, presented by Vanderbilt University in partnership with Humanities Tennessee, will connect faculty, students, alumni and others with university ties to a vast community that shares their love for creative expression.... Read More

Peter Hugo Nelson, Fisk University Random walks in active Learning- from an Einstein misconception to the value of simple models in the age of Ai This colloquium presents discoveries made while developing a novel active-learning approach for undergraduates interested in life sciences. The materials start with the “Marble Game”… Read More

The College of Arts and Science is ushering in a new era with the opening of the renovated and expanded Garland Hall. The welcoming, visionary space serves as a central hub for collaboration across the humanities, social sciences and natural sciences. Read More

Which new faculty member loves Lego? Get to know some of Vanderbilt’s newest faculty beyond their resume. Read More

Julien Guy, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory The dark energy of spectroscopic instrument: coSmological results from the data release 2 The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) collaboration is conducting a 5 year redshift survey of 40 million extra-galactic sources over 14,000 square degrees of the northern sky. One of its primary… Read More

Barry McKernan, City University of New York The importance of things in agn disks We are living in a golden age for gravitational wave detection of low mass binary black holes (BBH). BBH can occur in multiple different channels (e.g. massive stellar binaries, star clusters). In this talk I will… Read More

Meet some of Vanderbilt's newest faculty as they explain why Vanderbilt is the right academic home for them. Read More

Charles Bennett, IBM Research The quantum nature of information The information revolution is based on what a physicist would call a classical view of information. Quantum effects were long regarded as a manageable nuisance for information processing, preventing information in microscopic objects from being observed or copied accurately, but are… Read More

Carla Fröhlich, North Carolina State University Astronomical Goldmines The origin of the elements is a fundamental question that has fascinated humans since the earliest days. Unprecedented observational, experimental, and computational facilities have provided a wealth of data, allowing us to tackle the question of the origin of elements to ever… Read More

Jessie Runnoe, Vanderbilt University Quasars at the intersection of multi-messenger and time-domain astronomy Recent evidence for a low-frequency gravitational wave background attributable to a cosmological population of supermassive black hole binaries opens the frontier of multi-messenger astrophysics to most massive black holes in the Universe. In this context, the combination… Read More

The Curb Scholars program at The Curb Center for Art, Enterprise and Public Policy is taking on five new undergraduate students this semester. This program, inspired by the life and career of songwriter and entertainment figure Mike Curb, rewards stude... Read More

By Jenna Somers and Krystal Schmidt   This summer, around 30 middle-school students from the Tennessee Nature Academy explored upstream and downstream Mill Creek, which flows 28 miles from Nolensville to the Cumberland River in Tennessee. Some stu... Read More

Printer’s Fist, by Melissa Range, has been selected as the 2025 winner of the Vanderbilt University Literary Prize. The prize competition received more than 250 submissions. Printer’s Fist is scheduled for publication in March 2026 from Vanderbilt Univ... Read More

Joseph Kapusta, University of Minnesota Accelerator Disaster Scenarios, the Unabomber, and Scientific Risks The possibility that experiments at high-energy accelerators could create new forms of matter that would ultimately destroy the Earth has been considered several times in the past quarter century.  One consequence of the earliest of these disaster… Read More

After concluding her term as associate dean for academic affairs for the Graduate School, Terrah Akard will return to her role as professor of nursing in the School of Nursing. Julián Hillyer, Centennial Professor of Biological Sciences, and Andrea Pag... Read More

This year’s event will be titled “Vanderbilt University Presents: The Southern Festival of Books, a program of Humanities Tennessee,” marking a new chapter in the life of this storied public event and reflecting Vanderbilt’s deepening investment in the... Read More