Marissa Shapiro

The School of Medicine Basic Sciences is proud to announce the 2024 recipients of the Dean’s Award for Exceptional Achievement in Graduate Studies. Ten graduate students were recognized for their high academic and scientific achievement and for the originality, significance, and rigor of their dissertation research. Read More

Three biomedical research students win the inaugural Life is Beautiful Image Contest for their stunning scientific images. Read More

The National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases of the National Institutes of Health has renewed a five-year grant through the NIH’s flagship T32 institutional training grant program. T32 grants provide funding to support students and postdoctoral trainees working in focused areas of research that advance the NIH mission. Read More

In a recent episode of Smarter Every Day, YouTube sensation and host Destin Sandlin talks with Vanderbilt Professor Tina Iverson and Senior Research Associate Prashant Singh about bacterial “motors” and how they work in the microorganisms that make us sick. The video racked up more than 1.4 million views in its first day. Read More

Davies, Ihrie, and Iverson receive funding injections from Vanderbilt University to spur world-class research with translational promise. Read More

The burning sensation you feel in your mouth when you sip alcohol has a name: oral chemesthesis. Understanding this sensation better could lead to new treatments for alcohol use disorders, but research in this area is scarce. Assistant Professor of Pharmacology Cody Siciliano aims to change that with his project, “Neural Mechanisms of Oral Chemesthesis,” which has been awarded a $1.3 million grant from the W.M. Keck Foundation. Read More

To honor and continue Richard Caprioli’s legacy of teaching technological advances, the Richard Caprioli Basic Sciences Research Award for Technology Education fund has been established to allow Ph.D. students in the biomedical sciences to attend focused educational experiences in a technology that they would otherwise not encounter in their graduate studies. Read More

Over her two decades in the department, Jenkins has worked alongside the program’s educational leadership, managing student recruitment and enrollment, organizing critical data for DBMI’s National Library of Medicine grant, budgeting, overseeing weekly informatics seminars and planning social activities for students. Read More

Vanderbilt University graduate student Mary Oliver and her adviser, Julia Bohannon, have been named to the 2024 cohort of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Gilliam Fellows Program in recognition of “their outstanding research and commitments to advancing equity and inclusion in science.” The other Tennessee fellow, Déja Grant, is a graduate student in Cancer Biology at Meharry Medical College who is working in the lab of her adviser, Rachelle Johnson, associate professor of Medicine at VUMC and program director/director of Graduate Studies for Cancer Biology at Vanderbilt University. Read More