Discoveries

Vanderbilt University faculty members have been elected this year to membership in the National Academy of Medicine, a prestigious, non-governmental organization that advises the nation and the world on important aspects of medical science, health care and public health. Monteggia was recruited to Vanderbilt in 2018 to… Read More

In the mammalian brain, the chief inhibitory neurotransmitter is called GABA. The gene SLC6A1 encodes the GABA transporter GAT1, and in Neurobiology of Disease, Felicia Mermer, Sarah Poliquin, Jing-Qiong Kang, MD, PhD, and colleagues report experiments — in silico, in vitro and in mice-o… Read More

The Quality Education for Minorities Network, in partnership with Vanderbilt University, Louisiana Tech University, North Dakota State University and Temple University researchers, has been awarded nearly $70,000 in funding from the National Science Foundation to host the Pipelines to Pathways: Humanizing Diversity in STEM Conference. The conference aims to engage… Read More

James Crowe Jr., MD, director of the Vanderbilt Vaccine Center at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, has received the Building the Foundation Award from Research!America, a national biomedical research advocacy organization, for his team’s role in developing human monoclonal antibodies and vaccine candidates against COVID-19. The award, which was announced Oct. 6,… Read More

Vanderbilt University Medical Center has been awarded a nearly $8 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to construct a state-of-the-art BioSafety Level 3 (BSL3) facility for research involving the COVID-19 virus, anthrax and other dangerous microorganisms. VUMC currently has two BSL3 labs, but they are small, outdated and… Read More

Vanderbilt University Medical Center has received a five-year, $5 million grant from the National Cancer Institute to study precancerous lesions and early cancers in the colon, with the goal of developing new ways to prevent colorectal cancer, the nation’s second leading cancer killer. Robert Coffey, MD, Martha Shrubsole, PhD, and Ken… Read More

Dr. Ethan Lee, professor of cell and developmental biology and pharmacology, has been named a 2022 Innovation Fund investigator by The Pew Charitable Trusts. As a vote of confidence in the power of collaborative, interdisciplinary research, Pew created the Innovation Fund in 2017 to encourage partnerships among alumni of Pew’s  biomedical programs. Combining… Read More

Assistant Professor of Biochemistry Emily Hodges and graduate student Tyler Hansen used a blended approach to create a new, multi-omic method to identify and characterize gene regulatory elements—non-coding DNA sequences that control gene expression—in the human genome. The new technique, ATAC-STARR-seq, was published in Genome Research. During… Read More

One in 100 people have genetic variations that can cause potentially life-threatening heart conditions, including high cholesterol (lipid disorders), heart muscle disease (cardiomyopathies), and abnormal heart rhythms (arrhythmias). Yet the functional impact of most of these cardiovascular genetic variants — whether they disrupt normal function or are harmless — is… Read More

The Stanley Cohen Innovation Fund provides a yearly award to support innovative and groundbreaking research at Vanderbilt University. This year, after a competitive application process, Emily Hodges, assistant professor of biochemistry, and Terunaga Nakagawa, associate professor of molecular physiology and biophysics, were named as the 2022 recipients. Read More