Lorena Infante Lara

For our latest Alum Answers feature, meet Dave Vigerust, PhD’04, who trained as a scientist in Vanderbilt’s IGP umbrella program and then in the Cellular and Molecular Pathology program. He has spent his career interfacing between basic research and the clinic and is now the chief scientific and strategy officer of three companies. Read More

Bingshan Li and his lab are changing the paradigm of how geneticists can identify risk genes for schizophrenia, enabling new studies into its underlying biology and opening new doors for the development of treatments against it. Read More

Vanderbilt’s Dr. Benjamin P. Brown is improving the way the field of drug discovery creates machine learning algorithms to predict a protein’s interactions with a small molecule. These improvements bring ML closer to fulfilling its potential in the field—something that has not been realized after more than a decade of work. Read More

A Middle Tennessee native, Chase Spurlock, PhD’14, was drawn to Vanderbilt University for its excellence in healthcare and science. A project he completed in graduate school ignited in him a desire to impact patient lives through academic-industry partnerships, and he has not looked back since. Read More

A new image analysis tool called TrueSpot has the capacity to overhaul the quantity and quality of usable data that can be obtained from fluorescence microscopy, which is used across an enormous range of biological, biomedical, and physical research. Read More

Vanderbilt researchers probe the mysteries of an enzyme that could be used as a tool in basic research and medicinal chemistry. Read More

Kathleen DelGiorno has received a Research Scholar Award from the American Cancer Society to study pancreatic cancer development. She will focus on the role of two fatty acids that are known to be involved with tumorigenesis. Read More

Juan Carvajal-García has been named a 2025 Destination Biochemistry Advanced Postdoctoral Scholar, a distinction granted by the Department of Biochemistry at the School of Medicine Basic Sciences. The award will support his transition into an independent research position. Read More

Vanderbilt biochemists find role for lipids in age-related vision loss—and pave the way for potential new therapies. Read More

Recent work from a coalition of Vanderbilt labs has found clear distinctions in insulin-secreting β-cell subtypes and drawn a connection between certain subtypes and a higher risk of diabetes. Read More