Lorena Infante Lara

The lab of Kris Burkewitz just made a key discovery: How cellular machineries are structured and organized within a cell has implications for healthy aging. “We didn't just add a piece to the puzzle—we found a whole section that hasn't even been touched,” Eric Donahue, first author of the study, said. Read More

Millions of Americans struggle with cocaine use, yet research tools don’t yet reflect real-world drug use. Vanderbilt scientists have developed a new approach that more accurately models how people use cocaine, strengthening efforts to understand addiction and develop better therapies Read More

Kavya Sharman, BS’16, PhD’22, channeled dual expertise in science and business into launching Phase Capital, a Nashville-based venture capital firm focused on tech bio. Today, she supports founders working to transform scientific discoveries into scalable applications across the U.S., all while maintaining close ties to her Vanderbilt alma mater and home. Read More

Our School of Medicine Basic Sciences alums go far and wide. Check out the latest accomplishments from some of our alums! If you're an alum, let us know of any recent developments in your life. Read More

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved the use of the new antibiotic gepotidacin for use against uncomplicated gonorrhea. The biochemistry lab of Neil Osheroff provided all mechanism of action data in the FDA application. Read More

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