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Keivan Stassun sat down with fellow astronomers at Queen's University Belfast a few years back with no preset notions about how the two research teams might partner. What developed is a collaboration that is, well, out of this world.
The newly introduced researchers, normally separated by an ocean, didn't begin by asking what they were doing already that could be enhanced by sharing. Instead, they immediately began to talk about projects they couldn't have envisioned on their own, remembers Stassun, director of the Vanderbilt Initiative in Data-Intensive Astrophysics and professor of physics and astronomy. Stassun and his colleagues at Queen's were both "dealing with sort of an embarrassment of riches." Between the two universities, they had access to reams of data from observatories around the world. What they needed were intelligent computer tools to sift and winnow data in an automated way, alerting scientists to critical findings. So the teams developed them together.
College of Arts and Science and Queen's scholars work together on two different research thrusts: to locate and better understand exoplanets, which exist outside our solar system, and to detect and study supernova explosions. These efforts involve a host of graduate students, postdoctoral researchers and faculty members.
That collaboration is one part of several strong and emerging core partnerships between Vanderbilt and universities overseas, partnerships that are essential to the vitality of the college and to research institutions today.
"Looking forward, universities are going to have to create these kinds of global networks to compete effectively for students, faculty and resources. It's really turning into a global marketplace," says Tim McNamara, vice provost for faculty and international affairs.
McNamara likens the school's international efforts to a pyramid. Institutional agreements with core partners, like the one with Queen's, form the top of the pyramid. Other core partnerships—a recent but very well-developed association with the University of Melbourne, a longstanding one with the University of São Paulo in Brazil, and the rapidly expanding relationship with Queen's in Belfast, Nashville's sister city—have blossomed lately. Other core partners include China's Fudan University, Chile's Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and South Africa's University of Cape Town.
Faculty collaborations and graduate student exchange, such as bringing Queen's students to the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities as they complete their doctoral dissertations, comprise the pyramid's next tier.
And the all-important base of the pyramid will always be study abroad and student exchange, McNamara says.
The College of Arts and Science's global connections and international scholarship are natural extensions of a vibrant, meaningful liberal arts education, Dean Carolyn Dever says. "It's part of the college's mission to expand students' interest in other cultures and provide diverse experiences," she says. "Our increasingly global society makes it both possible and vital for students and faculty to be citizens of the world."
Institutional collaborations with core partners require a great deal of commitment from both participants, McNamara notes. Recently, Vanderbilt and Melbourne jointly provided $344,000 to support partnership grants for faculty.
One of those projects has Terry Lybrand, professor of chemistry, joining forces with colleagues at the University of Melbourne to analyze data from studies of small peptides and proteins that produce anti-microbial effects. Lybrand provides the in-depth computational work to analyze the data. His Melbourne counterparts will provide something Vanderbilt doesn't have—solid-state NMR spectroscopy.
Lybrand says the association is enhanced by the many common aspirations and features between the two universities and the fact that there is no language barrier. Well, almost no language barrier. Lybrand says Aussie slang takes a little getting used to.
These types of associations build slowly but yield surprising benefits. Melbourne has poured money into a gorgeous new eye institute, says Associate Professor of Chemistry Eva Harth. The Arts and Science professor develops targeted drug delivery for cancer treatment and researches nanoparticles to treat glaucoma. Melbourne's eye institute is eager to work with world experts to enhance their productivity and global standing. Already Harth was part of a plenary lecture in nanomedicine at Melbourne and is considering more possible collaborations.
The improved access to talent, resources and funding benefits both institutions, Harth says, adding, "You can accelerate only so much without good collaborators."
The third blossoming core partnership actually began many years ago with Chancellor Harvie Branscomb, who traveled to Brazil's University of São Paulo following World War II. He wanted Vanderbilt to be more than a Southern university and began by recruiting renowned scholars—Brazilianists—who formed the core of what is now the Center for Latin American Studies.
Nashville has "a natural synergy with Brazil," explains Jane Landers, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of History and CLAS interim director.
Landers, whose research focuses on Brazilian slavery and related issues, says the Southern United States and Brazil have a common history that included eradicating the indigenous population, seizing their land and bringing African slaves to work on plantations.
A great deal of research and collaboration has come out of this shared history, Landers notes. Brazil is working to elevate the lives of its poor black citizens and is intensely interested in the experiences of the American South, she says.
The South's difficult history with fair treatment and equal opportunities for minorities is also something that unites Nashville and Queen's University Belfast. Stassun says Queen's and Vanderbilt each have an institutional commitment to boosting educational and professional prospects for populations that have been underrepresented or faced prejudice.
Stassun co-directs the Fisk–Vanderbilt Masters-to-Ph.D. Bridge program, the university's alliance with the historically black university. "It turns out that Vanderbilt and Queen's both, for very different reasons, are at this very interesting point in history. Vanderbilt, through our partnership with Fisk, is attempting in an aggressive and progressive way to respond to the need for increased diversity in the sciences and to train diverse future leaders for the scientific professions," Stassun says.
"Northern Ireland is emerging from an era of great challenge and unrest. They are now addressing the challenges of successfully integrating traditionally self-segregated religious groups for full inclusion in the scientific professions," he says. "We're approaching those challenges institutionally in a similarly broadminded and positive and inclusive way."
Arts and Science's international interests support individual students and scholars, too. Building international connections early in a scholarly career can be a critical early marker of success, says Mona Frederick, executive director of the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities. That's a discovery that has characterized the Warren Center's graduate fellowship program with Queen's, which provides a fellowship to a Queen's graduate student to be part of the Warren Center for a year while the scholar works on his or her dissertation.
As dissertation adviser for Queen's graduate student Clive Hunter, Queen's University Senior Lecturer Maeve McCusker traveled to Nashville for a public lecture Hunter presented in conjunction with the program. She noted that the Warren Center's Graduate Student Fellows program projected "the very model of what a postgraduate community should look like."
"While students came from different disciplines and had an eclectic range of interests, I was genuinely dazzled by the connections and bridges they found between their varied fields," McCusker says. She was further dazzled when her Irish boyfriend, a Queen's faculty colleague who accompanied her on the trip, proposed in Tootsie's Orchid Lounge with a ring purchased at Tiffany in Nashville. Married now, the couple has a painting of Nashville's "honky-tonk strip" hanging in their dining room.
It's not just faculty and students learning from each other, either. Dean Carolyn Dever and other leaders have visited Queen's University Belfast and the University of Melbourne, and key officials from core partner institutions have visited and learned from Vanderbilt. Additionally, Queen's University has consulted with Vanderbilt as it builds its own humanities center in Belfast.
Each year, more than 40 percent of College of Arts and Science juniors study abroad in Vanderbilt-sponsored programs. The most popular one is Vanderbilt in France, which has been in existence for 51 years. The longstanding program has adapted over the years to accommodate changes in French culture and politics, and continues to develop new emphases. As part of the program, some students now choose to do internships with French companies or nonprofits, gaining valuable international work experience.
In addition to Vanderbilt's own programs in countries ranging from Argentina to New Zealand, the university works with other institutions to offer an even wider array of study abroad options.
For undergraduates seeking a unique abroad opportunity that combines travel and service overseas with a strong academic and research focus, there is the Vanderbilt Initiative for Scholarship and Global Engagement (VISAGE), begun in 2008.
Students first take a spring class centering on a country and topic of interest with the faculty member who will lead their four-week summer service trip. The course provides students with a foundation that equips them for more thoughtful service work and community engagement during their time abroad, explained Shelley Jewell, assistant director of the Global Education Office.
Participants typically travel to sites with a Vanderbilt presence, frequently involving Vanderbilt's core partners, making the program more sustainable.
Once the service abroad is complete, students have the option to follow up with a related, intensive research-based course. The experiences are often profound, Jewell says. "When students return to Vanderbilt, many confront their sense of privilege in relation to the communities they served," she says. "As a result, they often change the focus of their careers and want to return to those communities."
While the more traditional programs last a semester, increasing numbers of students now are taking advantage of monthlong Maymester experiences between spring semester exams and the start of summer sessions.
"For some students, a semester abroad sets them back," says Martin Rapisarda, Arts and Science associate dean. "Maymester fills a particular niche. It's time-intensive, it's thematically focused, and it's taught by Vanderbilt faculty who have special expertise on the topic and provide experiences that you couldn't necessarily have on campus."
The experience, he says, can be unforgettable and unmatched. "If I'm an English major and I can go to England and study reformation literature with (director of undergraduate writing) Roger Moore, going to pilgrimage sites as well as reading those texts, it brings those texts alive in a way that complements and enhances the experience," Rapisarda says.
Other relationship opportunities are emerging in other areas of the world, such as Germany and China and other parts of Asia, according to McNamara. "We try to find important areas of the world that will yield interesting and productive collaborations not necessarily looked at by others," he says.
"At a very high level our goal is to increase the impact and visibility of Vanderbilt worldwide in a very strategic, focused way."]]>
Can you say, "Please pass the salt" in another language? Residents of McTyeire International House can. Table conversation might be in any of the seven languages spoken at McTyeire, a residence hall where cultivating language fluency is a community commitment and expanding that fluency a 24-hour opportunity.
Founded in 1981 and now celebrating its 30th anniversary, McTyeire is a project of the College of Arts and Science in partnership with the Office of Housing and Residential Education and Dining Services. Open to students from all Vanderbilt colleges, McTyeire provides cultural and language immersion for residents without leaving the Nashville campus."It's like a giant classroom but without the grades," says Anja Bandas, McTyeire's program director. "It's a community. Some people come with only a year's language study, others have no formal training and learn (a language) as easily as drinking from a straw. Some have studied abroad and want to maintain fluency. Others are planning to go abroad."
Organized around six language halls—French, German, Japanese, Spanish, Russian and Chinese—McTyeire residents are encouraged to speak their target languages daily. Monday–Thursday suppers in the house's dining room—when students are required to converse exclusively in their designated language—are the cornerstone of the McTyeire experience. The dining room is renowned for its international meals. Other activities include weekly study breaks, social events and parties.
Residents just learning their target language and others with greater fluency live side by side. Each hall has a faculty adviser from the College of Arts and Science and a hall coordinator—typically a native speaker—who spearheads cultural understanding in the context of increasing fluency at dinner conversations and activities.A seventh hall is dedicated to international topics. Demand for specific language halls varies, with strongest interest recently in Japanese and Chinese; Spanish has always been in high demand.
For Shana Wamuhu, a native of Kenya majoring in political science, the McTyeire melting pot is a lush, yet level, cross-cultural playing field.
"McTyeire has helped me learn to interact with other cultures. Without that, the potential for cultural misunderstandings is enormous," says Wamuhu, a senior in her second year on McTyeire's International Interest Hall.
"I wouldn't be where I am today if it weren't for McTyeire," says Adam Hunter, BA'00. Hunter parlayed his two years on McTyeire's German Hall, his German and European studies majors and study-abroad experience into jobs with the German Marshall Fund and Robert Bosch, one of Germany's largest foundations. He later worked in the German parliament with Cem Özdemir, co-chair of the Green Party. After earning his master's in public policy at the Kennedy School of Government, he joined the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service."McTyeire isn't a foreign students dorm, it's an everyone dorm, a place that mixes cultures and ideologies," Hunter says. "It's a place where people with varying levels of fluency can grow and learn. In many ways, it's a testament to the character and diversity of our nation."
Associate Dean Fräncille Bergquist was one of McTyeire's founders and has oversight responsibility for the academic program. "McTyeire isn't so much about creating language fluency as about giving students an opportunity to enhance their language ability," says Bergquist, also an associate professor of Spanish. "McTyeire is unique because we mix the languages in one residence hall, providing a deep cultural experience as well as a cross-cultural one."
Cross-cultural is an apt description of Todd Miller's application of his three semesters at McTyeire while studying economics. "I have lived abroad continuously since graduating, except when I earned my MBA from Columbia," says Miller, BA'88, who spent 17 years based in Hong Kong as an executive with Sony Entertainment. "Practically everything I have done since Vanderbilt has had some international dimension. I have traveled to more than 100 countries for work and for play. McTyeire nurtured, whetted and shaped my international outlook." Miller recently took an 83-day bicycle trek from Portugal to Turkey to raise funds for an Asian children's charity and credits his German fluency with helping him make friends along the way.
For some residents, like Erika Leicht, a junior majoring in German and public policy studies, McTyeire fulfills multiple goals. "I was close to fluent in German, but McTyeire lets me speak spontaneously, to have conversations," she says. "Unlike in class, here you can't plan everything you say." Leicht says McTyeire also builds unity and camaraderie.
"There's a sense of community among the people in the halls. We're close. It's totally different than the dorm I lived in previously," says Leicht, who has set her sights on study in Germany and a postgraduation Fulbright Fellowship or internship with a German company.
McTyeire is open to sophomores, juniors, seniors and graduate students. A committee that includes residents, faculty and staff makes selections. Bandas, a cultural anthropologist and native of Germany who also serves as the German Hall's coordinator, says that when it comes to joining McTyeire, fluency carries less weight than motivation and commitment.
McTyeire Spanish Hall alumna Clarissa Adams Fletcher, BA'86, MA'90, was a Latin American studies major. "I came to McTyeire with a love for languages and found it to be a place where I could use it (Spanish) every day," says Fletcher, who was named the 2011 National Language Teacher of the Year by the American Council on Teaching of Foreign Languages. "I met people there from all over the world and that opened my eyes to different points of view."
She tells her Spanish students at Georgia's Dunwoody High School that fluency is only one benefit to language study. "It helps create globally competent citizens who are flexible and able to learn and relearn, apply new skills and communicate with a broad spectrum of people," Fletcher says.]]>
Vanderbilt honors him with its Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities and Fugitive and Agrarian Collection; Guthrie has the Robert Penn Warren Birthplace House…although it nearly lost that.
In spring 1986, Guthrie resident Jeane Moore read a newspaper article reporting that Western Kentucky University wanted to buy the small home where Warren had been born in 1905 and move it to the university's campus.
Moore immediately called the person quoted in the article. "We had quite a conversation," Moore recalls. "I'll never forget her last words…she said to me, 'Well, you know, Mrs. Moore, that Guthrie isn't a proper place to have the Robert Penn Warren house.' I said, 'Well, it was good enough for him to be born here,' and I hung up the phone."
The fight was on.
Moore, Guthrie native Melba Smith and a handful of other residents set out to prevent the relocation of the brick bungalow on Third Street.
"Our mayor said, 'Well, now, you know we can put up a little monument there on the site,' and I said, 'No, Mr. Mayor. We're not going to be putting up any monument.' I was ready to lie down out there in the street," Smith says. "It was like, if you're going to come and take this house away, you're going to have to do it over my dead body."
Moore says her opposition was based on historic legacy. "He was one of the most famous writers in the world, and I just didn't want them to take the house. You can't change history," she says. "The man was born here; you can't move it somewhere else and have it have meaning."
That Guthrie had meaning for Warren is unmistakable. Although he left in his teens for Vanderbilt and came back only for visits, the people, places, experiences and memories of Guthrie remained with him.
"But as far as writing is concerned, the basic images that every man has, I suppose, go back to those of his childhood. He has to live on that capital all his life," Warren told an editor of Studies in the Novel at Yale University in 1969.
The acclaimed poet and novelist returned to that theme often in his writing. He wrote the poem "True Love" when he was 83 about a beautiful girl he saw when he was a boy in Guthrie. "It seems to me that all your vital images are ones you get before you're seven, eight, nine years old," Warren told The New England Review in 1978. "That's true for my life anyway."
With so much of Guthrie having shaped Warren, it was important for the Kentucky town of approximately 1,500 to keep ties to its most famous citizen. By the mid-1980s, the community was changed from the one Warren knew. His parents, siblings and many friends were gone. The railroad presence was a shadow of what it had been. Places he recalled and the houses his family lived in were in private hands. The town didn't have anything to honor its native son.
"First we got the townspeople and the county people all riled up," Smith recalls. Then the small group called politicians. They wrote Warren scholars. They alerted the media. The media turned the tide, the women say. "The Atlanta Constitution came up and did a two-page story on us," Smith says. Then newspapers all over the country took up the story.
In a few weeks, the battle was over. The sale to the university didn't go through and the 17 members of the Committee for the Preservation of the Robert Penn Warren Birthplace found themselves called upon to sign a legal agreement making them personally responsible for the house's mortgage."That was one of the things that hit us," Moore recalls. "We've made all this fuss—now it was ours. We've got it and we've got to do something with it, or we'd have egg all over our faces. So we had to go on. We couldn't stop."
The house had had several owners since the Warrens moved to another Guthrie house during Warren's boyhood. Most recently, it had been rental property owned by two Air Force colonels at nearby Fort Campbell. It would require renovation, collections and period-appropriate furnishings to make it a proper museum. And funds.
The committee registered as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit and raised the money needed to purchase, repair and run the house. "We actually paid for the house with grassroots fundraising, mostly luncheons that we catered in the house," Moore says of the group that continues to oversee the birthplace. "That was over a long period of time. We had yard sales, we had auctions, we had walks, everything we could think of.
"At the same time we were doing that, we were making people aware of Warren, going to schools, giving programs, having schoolchildren here—once the house was to a point that we could have people inside," she says. "We wanted the schoolchildren to know that this man had made it to the top of his profession and he was from Guthrie, Ky.—so they could do it, too."
Today, the meticulously restored house is furnished with antiques and Warren materials. Visitors can stand in the room where Warren was born and view memorabilia, books and photos, including a portrait created for Life magazine and donated by Annie Leibovitz. They can learn how Guthrie shaped him and his work.
Moore, Smith and others on the committee tell personal stories, tales handed down from people who knew the Warren family. They share wonderful anecdotes, ranging from how childhood bullies tried to hang Warren in a nearby barn to the opinion most locals had of the family ("Everybody in town knew that Thomas was the successful Warren boy. The other one had gone off and he was making a job out of going to school. He was continually going to school," Moore relates dryly.).
It was that going to school that brought him to Vanderbilt, where Warren found where his true interests lay: in poetry, writing, literature and teaching.
The women say that when they read Warren's work, they find Guthrie. "Warren drew on everything around us," Smith says. "The woods, the railroad, the bullbats and the cinders. The people, the characters…Unless you're from here, and knew of some of those people, you don't even realize he's writing about Guthrie. I think his whole life here spoke to him and he just valued it so much. It's just amazing."]]>
A green world perches on the top floor of MRB III, where the College of Arts and Science's greenhouses are nurtured by greenhouse manager Jonathan Ertelt, MEd'99.
The greenhouses span seven rooms and are home to upwards of a thousand plant species—several of which are so recently discovered that they don't yet have scientific names. Ertelt has collected, acquired, cultivated and maintained these plants and their environment for 17 years, sharing plant knowledge with students, faculty and researchers in a sort of living lab and library.
Tony Hmelo's research has taken him from NASA to nanoscience and from New York to Nashville.
Hmelo is associate director for operations and outreach for the Vanderbilt Institute of Nanoscale Science and Engineering, the interdisciplinary group researching new science and technology based on tiny—nanoscale—materials. (Nanotechnology is widely considered the next great scientific frontier.)
As research professor of physics and of materials science and engineering, Hmelo himself is interdisciplinary, since he holds appointments in both the College of Arts and Science and the School of Engineering.
I have always been interested in the science and engineering of materials. I arrived at Vanderbilt in 1988 shortly after receiving my Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. While earning my degree, I held down a job to design and manage an X-ray research beam line at the National Synchrotron Light Source…my first engineering career.
I had the opportunity to work with researchers from all across the nation who used that facility to characterize different kinds of single crystal materials, including some very interesting specimens that were manufactured in space. This captured my imagination and resonated with one of my childhood aspirations—to become an astronaut.
Vanderbilt was staffing the new Center for Microgravity Research and Applications under the direction of engineering professor and former astronaut Taylor Wang. I saw an opportunity to link my passion for materials with my childhood dream, and Vanderbilt became my ticket to ride, literally.
The late 1980s and 1990s were an exciting start to my materials science career at Vanderbilt. I was a co-investigator for several fluid physics experiments that flew on three different space shuttle missions. In support of those experiments, I think I visited every NASA center several times, tested flight hardware aboard zero-gravity aircraft, worked with and helped train the mission specialists who flew and conducted the science on-orbit, and was able to support the missions in person inside the Payload Operations Center in Huntsville, Ala.
But nothing lasts forever. During the mid-1990s, national priorities changed, and new opportunities emerged. Visionary Vanderbilt faculty worked to establish the Vanderbilt Institute of Nanoscale Science and Engineering in 2002. This was an opportunity for me to shift gears and take on new challenges. I formally joined VINSE in 2003, in time to manage the construction of the original core laboratories.
Imagine preparing a novel material or engineering a new device with critical features so tiny that dust particles floating in the air make the difference between success and failure during the manufacturing process.
At VINSE we provide a special environment called a clean room, where we take great care to control the presence of these airborne contaminants. At 1,636 square feet, this is the largest general-purpose facility of its kind on campus. The laboratory air is scrubbed clean after passing through a grid of HEPA filters comprising the ceiling of the room.
Bunny suits are special white garments we wear over our street clothing that zip closed, and together with a hair cap, shoe covers and other safety items, help protect the room from potential contaminants that may be present on our persons. The room is brightly illuminated and constructed of white panel walls with glass windows. With users in their white bunny suits, the laboratory can appear surreal.
We perform cutting-edge work that involves the routine use of hazardous chemicals and flammable and toxic gases in a confined space. These need to be managed carefully and disposed of properly.
My challenge is to work with my staff to ensure that all users are well-trained in clean room procedures. At any given time, we have around 100 authorized users of the facility, with a large turnover every semester. The lab constantly evolves over time with the addition of new equipment and new hazards. Keeping the changing user population informed of the changing laboratory hazard profile is a significant challenge.
If I must name a pet peeve, it is that too many people need to be reminded to wear their personal protective equipment: safety glasses, gloves, lab coats, etc. I understand that users are focused on their research and my responsibility is to make sure they go home at the end of the day able to enjoy the fruits of their labor.
I spend my typical week maintaining and repairing instruments, attending research group meetings, writing proposals to acquire new instruments and improve facilities, engaging in outreach activities that give talented high school students in middle Tennessee an opportunity to learn more about Vanderbilt and VINSE, and training users. There are many administrative duties required to keep the laboratories running properly that ensure I am constantly occupied.
One of my priorities is to spend at least a few hours every week working with students on projects of particular interest to me, such as novel applications for diamond films and devices.
When I lived in the New York area, I enjoyed having ready access to the cultural amenities, especially off-Broadway theater, the Public Theater in particular. I miss Montauk Point in the summertime and its dramatic seascape. However I have learned to love the Southeast and consider myself a true Nashvillian. I know every trail around Radnor Lake like the back of my hand. If you cannot find me at the symphony, you might look for me at the Bluebird Cafe. I even have my own black-eyed pea recipe I fix every New Year's Day.]]>
But the room is much more than a quiet computer lab. Instead, it is a window to the very forefront of modern physics, allowing Vanderbilt University researchers to transport half a world away to the border of Switzerland and France, where collisions of protons and heavy ions occur at nearly the speed of light.
The Stevenson facility is one of eight virtual control rooms in the United States that collect data from experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) outside Geneva, Switzerland. For most of the year, physicists study the results of collisions of protons that occur in the vacuum-sealed chambers 50-175 meters underground. One month each year, the focus is on heavy ions.
Each collision generates mountains of data and, as a Tier 1 computing center for the project, Vanderbilt plays a key role in collecting and storing the data and disseminating it to thousands of other researchers around the world. Vanderbilt also took a lead role in creating the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment, one of two main particle detectors in the LHC.
"People will say, 'You've got 2,000 people on this experiment; what can one group [Vanderbilt] matter?'" says Victoria Greene, professor of physics and senior associate dean of graduate education, College of Arts and Science. "You're developing a reputation with these 2,000 people. There are entire research areas where the annual conference is less than half that. This is significant."
Since the collider beam was first turned on in March 2010, it's already yielded significant results. None has gained more attention than results indicating that scientists are getting closer to discovery of the Higgs boson, which could help explain why particles have mass. The CMS team and another team, Atlas, completed "astonishingly fast analysis of this data," Greene says. "Neither result is big enough to reach the level needed for a discovery and it seems clear that we will need at least another year's worth of data."
While finding the elusive Higgs boson—sometimes called the "God particle"—may be one of the major goals of the LHC, it is far from the only research that's being conducted. Greene, Professor of Physics Charles Maguire and Professor of Physics Julia Velkovska received one of Vanderbilt's own IDEAS grants to study jet shapes in heavy ion collisions. Associate Professor of Physics Will Johns performs research that makes him the "go-to person for the pixel tracking detectors, the fine tracking detectors at the heart of CMS," Greene says.
Vanderbilt plays a key role in collecting and storing the data and disseminating it to thousands of other researchers around the world.
"All top physics departments have a presence in fundamental physics like this," Greene says. "Ultimately, you need to be able to understand matter in its essence. It's also attractive to students. As soon as LHC turned on, we had more students than we knew what to do with. Students want to work at the energy frontier and that's something we can provide."
To be sure, there are modern-day challenges, such as the weekly meetings that alternate between convenient times for those in Europe and for researchers in the States. That may mean that a Vanderbilt postdoctoral researcher like Monika Sharma makes a presentation at 2 a.m.—ensuring that her web camera is turned off so no one can see that she's ready for bed. It also requires physics graduate student Eric Appelt to be available any time the green on the screen turns red, indicating that there's an issue with the quality of the data that's being sent. He has five minutes to respond to avert a flurry of panicked calls from researchers from around the world, concerned about data being lost.
"We actually rotate being on call," Appelt says. "There is actually a human being looking at these all the time. If one of these turns red, there's someone somewhere in the world with a beeper."
While the LHC is itself a marvel, the sheer volume of data that it creates brings both challenges and potential. In December 2010, the heavy ion collisions generated 30 million separate events, all of which had to be analyzed. In all, the LHC provides enough data to fill 1.7 million dual-sided DVDs each year; Vanderbilt has devoted more than 1,000 computer cores to store the information.
"It's a different scale and a different amount of data that is being collected," Sharma says. "There's definitely more pressure with it as we're managing the needs of the Tier 2 centers and doing the physics analysis ourselves. It's really keeping your feet on two different poles and trying to manage."
But as the research continues to yield impressive discoveries, the juggling has proven productive.
"In this field it is especially important to choose your experiments wisely, because the experiments take such a long time to plan, build and conduct that you can't work on very many in your career," Greene says. "Tantalizing results like these underscore that fact that we physicists chose well when we joined CMS, and Vanderbilt chose well in supporting our efforts."]]>
While in the College of Arts and Science in the mid-1950s, young Antonio Gotto Jr. caught the attention of his Sigma Nu fraternity brothers, who constantly sought out the clever student for crash courses in their own studies.
The biochemistry major also found himself with no shortage of eager mentors (in particular Dean Madison Sarratt and Dr. F. Tremaine Billings) who encouraged him to apply for a Rhodes Scholarship, modeled discipline and diligence, and taught him how to write—elements that would enrich his career and life in unforeseen ways.
This year, Gotto (BA'57, MD'65)—now a world-renowned expert of atherosclerosis, the primary cause of cardiovascular disease—retired as Cornell University's provost for medical affairs and the Stephen and Suzanne Weiss Dean at Weill Cornell Medical College in Manhattan.
During his 15-year tenure as dean, Gotto oversaw the raising of $2.6 billion in various campaigns. He established a school branch and biomedical research program in Qatar, joined forces with the Catholic church and Tanzanian government to start a medical school in Tanzania, and formed an affiliation with Methodist Hospital in Houston. He also quadrupled Weill Cornell's endowment and created 122 new faculty endowments during what benefactor Sanford Weill considered the school's "golden age."
Beneath the titles and accolades, those who know Tony Gotto say he is first and foremost a devoted dad, quick wit, voracious reader and the kind of man to put Weill at ease by ordering less-than-heart-healthy eggs Benedict—one of Weill's favorites—at a breakfast meeting.
"He's the most comfortable person you'll ever meet," says longtime family friend Barbara Gregg Phillips (BA'58, MA'70), who roomed with Anita, Gotto's wife of 53 years, while they were students at Peabody College. "He always makes you feel like he's glad you're there, a Southern gentleman through and through."
But make no mistake: There's no peaceful rocking chair in this Southern gentleman's immediate future. Gotto is transitioning into a new role of co-chairing the Board of Overseers of Weill Cornell Medical College. His first year of retirement is looking less and less like a sabbatical by the hour, says Anita Safford Gotto, BS'59. Dr. Gotto won't have the day-to-day running of the medical school under his purview, but there still will be meetings and plenty of travel.
"He's planning the international section of our trips, and I'm getting together the national section," she says. "It is still to be determined just how this retirement is going to work out."
If anyone would know, it would be Anita Gotto. His partner in vocation as well as in life, she has been a constant confidante, encourager and helpmate. They each tell the story of how they met on a bus to summer camp when they were 13 and 15—but only Anita adds the fact that she spent most of her first year of high school in the girl's bathroom avoiding his pursuit. She eventually gave in when she saw how many others thought highly of him; by the time Gotto left Nashville on the Rhodes Scholarship for the University of Oxford, they were engaged.
Under the leadership of Sir Hans Kornberg and Sir Hans Krebs, Gotto's time at the British university opened his eyes to the underlying pathophysiology of disease, and a focus on lipidology came next. He enjoyed a season at the National Institutes of Health, then spent 20 years chairing the Department of Internal Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston and the Methodist Hospital, all the while researching the link between cholesterol carriers (the good and bad cholesterol) and heart disease, and became a pioneer in educational efforts aimed at cardiovascular risk reduction.
He also kept a steady roster of patients, ranging from international dignitaries to everyday folks. And he became the father of three daughters—two of whom developed diabetes early on, deepening his passion for helping those who are sick become well. One developed further complications that have disabled her; the Gottos travel to Houston to be with her every few weeks.
"It resets your priorities when one of your children has a serious, life-threatening illness," Gotto says. "It does alter everything."
Future days, of course, will bring more time with family, more time with friends and more time spent on the visionary, big-picture ideas that are a hallmark of Gotto's career.
Among those visionary concepts was proving a link between cholesterol and hardening of the arteries and thus the connection between lowering cholesterol and lower incidence of heart disease. Another was the transformation of complex medical information into layman's language in the groundbreaking books by Gotto and longtime friend, heart surgeon Dr. Michael DeBakey. Their The Living Heart, The New Living Heart and The New Living Heart Cookbook championed healthy, good-tasting food. A revised edition, The Living Heart in the 21st Century, was published in April.
Today, Gotto looks back on his time in the College of Arts and Science as a season of great preparation—and a lot of hard work.
"I had grown up knowing about Vanderbilt, and it was the only place I wanted to go," says Gotto, named the university's Distinguished Alumnus in 2000. "It had a reputation for having very high academic standards." It also had a rigorous, disciplined program that set good habits for the more independent, less structured format he found at Oxford.
"I worked very hard," he says. "Particularly my first year. It got a little easier, but not much.…I can't say whether students then were any more or less smart. But I'm glad I don't have to compete to get into medical school today."
He's also glad, he says, that his career ended up taking him to the dean's office at Cornell, where his everyday presence will be sorely missed.
"To use a football metaphor, Dean Gotto is a 'triple threat,'" says Cornell University President David Skorton. "If he were playing gridiron football, he would be equally adept at running, passing and kicking, and thus a very valuable player on his team—as he has been on the Cornell team for 15 years.
"He excels in teaching, research and clinical care," Skorton says. "He combines empathy for his patients, students and colleagues with an incisive intellect and a strong commitment to engagement for using his enormous and varied skills to lift the world's burdens."]]>
"He's a brilliant and caring teacher, a productive and admired scholar, a supportive if sometimes provocative and crabby colleague, and a witty, refreshingly naughty presence around the department," says Paul Elledge, professor of English, emeritus.
Mark Schoenfield, professor and chair of English, echoes that sentiment: "He's a transformative figure in the department. I respect him enormously. He cherishes his Southern tradition but is a relentless critic of what needed and still needs to change.
"Fifty years ago our department was full of white men teaching about dead white men," Schoenfield says. "Today it's enormously diverse not only in terms of our faculty, but also in what we are teaching: Caribbean literature, African-American literature, film, women's literature and gender studies. Vereen was very much a part of that change—a voice for transformation."
Often, Bell's was a lone voice. As a young professor during the turbulent 1960s, he was a strong advocate for civil rights and academic freedom and an opponent of the war in Vietnam.
"He marched, protested, joined the Nashville sit-ins and delivered petitions on campus," Elledge says. "He was forcefully behind hiring African Americans, other ethnicities and women, even when it was not popular."
The grandson of a Georgia Supreme Court justice, Bell was born in Cairo, Ga. His father, novelist Vereen McNeill Bell, was killed in action during World War II when the younger Bell was barely 10 years old.
"He was a wonderful father," Bell remembers. "We'd go fishing and hunting together with his friends, and then he'd take some pictures and write an article about it for Sports Afield or Field and Stream. It gave me a warped idea of what real life was going to be like.
"My stepfather was a very literate person himself, a small town, Faulknerian lawyer who had me reading Hardy and Hemingway and Dostoyevsky before I was out of high school," Bell says. "I guess all of this steered me to study English literature."
Bell came to the College of Arts and Science in 1961, after earning degrees from Davidson College and Duke University. Today the professor of English has received just about every teaching honor Vanderbilt offers, including the Madison Sarratt Prize for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, the Outstanding Graduate Teaching Award, and the Chancellor's Cup for contributions to student-faculty relations beyond the classroom. He also received a university award for contributions to diversity and equity.
Bell is a favorite of both students and alumni, Schoenfield says, and his classes are always full.
Former student Nancy Page Lowenfield, BA'10, says, "Professor Bell taught me to think critically and act thoughtfully in a way that no other professor or class has." First-year Vanderbilt law student Andrew Preston, BA'09, remembers Bell's lectures as "funny, engaging and incisive."
"Professor Bell brings a wealth of experience to his lectures," Preston continues. "Once, upon returning from a summer abroad, I told him that I had gone running with the bulls in Pamplona. Professor Bell responded with a story about how he had met Hemingway during his own trip to Pamplona some 50 years earlier. I didn't think that anyone would be able to make my running of the bulls experience seem boring by comparison, but, sure enough, he did. And, honestly, I should have seen it coming. Professor Bell is just that legendary."
Being a legend has hardly slowed him down. He teaches both undergraduate and graduate students and serves as associate chair of the department. His scholarship includes the modern British and American novel, modern British poetry, W.B. Yeats and Irish history, film studies and literary theory.
In addition to books on Robert Lowell, Cormac McCarthy and Yeats, Bell has written about Charles Dickens, Robert Frost, T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf. "I'm interested in a lot of different things that don't connect with each other," he says wryly.
He is currently working on a book about British and Irish writers in the 1920s and early '30s. "I'm looking at the nature of their interest in Italian fascism, what it seemed like from that end of history as opposed to our end."
Bell and his wife, Jane, have five children and more than half a dozen grandchildren. He nurtures old friendships, annually traveling to Florida for saltwater fishing with humorist Roy Blount Jr., BA'63, and four other friends—a ritual that has lasted for 33 years—and to Montana for fly fishing with two other Vanderbilt alumni, Will Johnston, BA'66, JD'69, and his brother Duck Johnston, BA'71. The families of all these friends get together every fall for a long weekend in the Smokies.
"Vereen came to Vanderbilt as a young professor during my junior year, and we have been friends ever since," Blount says. "He is the best example of 'Gladly would he learn and gladly teach' that I ever came across. And he can fish good."
A baseball fan, Bell has visited the Yankees spring training camp in Tampa several times with friends Roy Gottfried, professor of English, and August Johnson, a 60-year Vanderbilt employee and former Negro League baseball player.
"We met in the 1970s and from then on our relationship began to grow," Johnson told the Vanderbilt Register in 2001. "We were all interested in baseball, but mostly we shared some of the same ideas. Over the years, we became close."
During his half-century in the College of Arts and Science, Bell has witnessed academic, racial and cultural changes on campus. "Vanderbilt has changed over the years just like the rest of the world," he says, "but usually about five years later than everyone else."
Called a "catalyst for change" by many, Bell pauses when asked what, if anything, needs to change at Vanderbilt today. "Vanderbilt is racially diverse, but I would like to see it also become more socio-economically diverse," he finally says, noting that rising tuition seems to make the university less accessible to students of modest means. "The administration seems to be moving us in the right direction on this score," he says, referencing Vanderbilt's national leadership in eliminating need-based loans and meeting fully demonstrated financial needs for all undergraduates.
"Most of the good things in my life right now are associated with having been at Vanderbilt—my wife, my children, my friends and students, my colleagues, my intellectual life. It's an amazing thing to be able to work in a place where everyone working around you is way smarter than you are. I couldn't be happier doing what I'm doing," he says. "What other job could someone like me have where every day you get to be around such attractive, articulate and intelligent young people? Going to work every morning is like going to the show."]]>
It was 1972. I had completed my freshman year at Emory in Atlanta. My father had passed away that September and I'd transferred to Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green to help with our family construction business, James N. Gray Co.
In October, I applied to Vanderbilt. I offer everlasting thanks to my mother for insisting I fill out that application in the fall of '72. After being accepted to the College of Arts and Science, I transferred to Nashville and began to spend a lot of time on the road back and forth to my hometown of Glasgow, Ky., which lies just across the Kentucky line from Tennessee.As a transfer student, it was hard. It was hard to make friends, hard to focus on classes, and hard because I was trying to adjust to life without my father and to help with the business as well.
But Vanderbilt provided a sanctuary and taught me a lot about discipline, persistence and determination.
I got some extraordinary instruction too … especially in an English composition course, where a full grade point was the penalty for any one (yes, just one!) grammatical error. That's when I learned to write … and the difference between a colon and a semicolon, and how to identify split infinitives and dangling participles. I learned who Kate Turabian was, too, and about her legendary guidebook, A Manual for Writers.
The campus itself was like a private park. I discovered something remarkably inviting, uplifting and motivating about the walk leading to the library. I remember that walk down the hill, then into the building and to my favorite study hall, the Fugitive Poets room in the basement. The building itself, with its Gothic Revival architecture, represented a touchstone, an inspirational bricks-and-mortar dimension of Vanderbilt's mission and purpose.
Philosophy classes taught by John Lachs and Charles Scott aided my grieving and deepened my curiosity for studying the puzzles in life, whether personal or business ones, or those I work on today: political and policy puzzles.
So, in shorthand, what did Vanderbilt give a kid from a small town in Kentucky?
It gave me what education at a great institution is supposed to do: the tools, discipline and fascination for lifelong learning and—I like to think—a little courage as well.
When I made other transitions later in life—through financial adversity in a family business, through coming out and into public service, first as vice mayor of the city of Lexington and later as mayor—I would often go back to papers I wrote at Vanderbilt, papers I kept in a file at my office, and just read those papers for meaning and for value and encouragement that I needed at the time.Today, in my role as mayor, I can see clearly why the humanities and the sciences are fired together in a liberal arts college, how creativity influences technology and art influences engineering. Steve Jobs got it right when, at the end of a new product launch, he would show a slide that showed a sign at the intersection of Liberal Arts and Technology Streets. That's what Vanderbilt is all about. Creating the framework for learning and connecting the dots.
Years after I graduated, I was happy when my niece, Rebekah Hinson Gray, BA'03, chose Vanderbilt and studied art history, the same major her grandmother—my late mother, Lois Howard Gray, MA'42—studied almost 70 years ago at Peabody. That niece has joined our family business today. Rebekah got the full four years in at Vanderbilt and gained friends and relationships that will help her throughout life.
My college experience was different. But even though I didn't gain the host of lifelong friendships others may in a Vanderbilt experience, I thrived in other ways. Vanderbilt offered a cloister for reflection at a time I needed it. It helped me build strength. It helped me build the fortitude and capacity to recognize that the human spirit triumphs during times of adversity—it doesn't fail us.
That's a big lesson. And Vanderbilt helped in a big way.]]>
Undergraduates in Vanderbilt's Systems Biology and Bioengineering Undergraduate Research Experience (SyBBURE) Searle Undergraduate Research Initiative work side-by-side with internationally recognized experts. One of only a handful of multiyear, year-round undergraduate research programs in the nation, SyBBURE Searle prepares students—primarily from the College of Arts and Science and the School of Engineering—for careers in research. SyBBURE Searle alumni can be found in labs and medical schools ranging from Stanford, Berkeley and Rice to Northwestern, MIT, the University of Washington, Cambridge and Vanderbilt.
SyBBURE Searle participants explore science at the intersection of systems biology and bioengineering. To date, about 110 undergraduates have participated in the program, which owes its existence to the financial support of D. Gideon Searle, BS'75.
In 2006, Searle committed to funding the Searle Undergraduate Research Initiative within the Vanderbilt Institute for Integrative Biosystems Research and Education. The aim of the initiative is to provide undergraduate students with mentored experiences in advanced scientific investigation with some of the university's leading faculty. Searle, who doubled majored in sociology and psychology, continues the interest in science and research that was the hallmark of his great-great-grandfather, G.D. Searle, founder of the pharmaceutical giant that bore his name (the company is now part of Pfizer Inc.). Gideon Paul (G.P.) Searle, BA'07, D. Gideon Searle's son, also graduated from the College of Arts and Science.
While SyBBURE Searle is open to any Vanderbilt undergraduate, most participants are nascent scientists and researchers who crave more focused educational experience. The majority are selected by Kevin Seale, MS'97, PhD'00, SyBBURE Searle's director, and John Wikswo, who directs VIIBRE.
Wikswo says that SyBBURE Searle's success stems from its selection of students who have a passion for scientific inquiry, and who persevere in viewing failure as just another step in the process and integral to advancing knowledge.
"In class, students know the professor knows the answers to the questions. Here we're asking questions to which no one knows the answers. How do you measure this? What does that mean?" says Wikswo, Gordon A. Cain University Professor, A.B. Learned Professor of Living State Physics, and professor of biomedical engineering, molecular physiology and biophysics, and physics. "SyBBURE Searle is a place where it's totally acceptable to be ignorant. There are no stupid questions."
Although most SyBBURE Searle participants are high achievers, selection for the experience isn't based on GPA or transcripts alone, explains Seale, assistant professor of the practice of biomedical engineering.
"We look for people who can take responsibility, who are self-starters," he says. "We try to involve students as freshmen so we can have them as long as possible. That's different than in most labs, where the belief is that younger students don't know enough to be helpful."
Katherine Roth, a rising senior majoring in molecular and cellular biology, is passionate about questions and challenges. A SyBBURE Searle student since her sophomore year, Roth says, "I like the puzzle research presents. It's like following a chain of questions and answers. The answers just bring up more questions."
Roth was drawn to SyBBURE Searle by its balance of independent work and access to mentors and research-motivated graduate students and undergraduates. She comes by her curiosity naturally: Her father, Brad J. Roth, MS'85, PhD'87, is a professor of physics at Oakland University. Wikswo was his dissertation adviser here, and Katherine's mother, Shirley Oyog Roth, MS'86, also earned her degree in physics at Vanderbilt.
Katherine Roth has her sights set on obtaining a doctorate in immunology. Her research, which involves manipulating yeast cells so they produce specific proteins, has the potential to help explain cell activity.
"We don't understand how many biological and disease systems work," she says. "If we have a better understanding, we have a better chance of changing that behavior."
In addition to receiving stipends, SyBBURE Searle participants benefit from the kind of support and exposure some institutions reserve for graduate or doctoral students. Wikswo notes that the initiative awards prizes for the best research paper and provides funds for undergraduates to attend major conferences. "We have a dozen peer-reviewed publications with SyBBURE Searle students as authors and are filing patents with students as inventors," he says.
Those experiences have a profound impact. "They become credible instantly," Seale says. "They find that they have a voice and they have value. It raises their confidence to learn that while they may not necessarily be the best performers in the classroom, they are good at research and innovation."
For Seale, the program is valuable not only in helping young researchers thrive with basic training and experience, but also in addressing a larger problem.
"There's a lot of talk about American students not being able to compete in math and science," he says. "We find the greater issue is that students don't often get the opportunities they need to grow in these areas. Through SyBBURE Searle, students have that.
"In academia there's a tendency for there to be 'stars,' but in SyBBURE Searle, everyone—undergrads, faculty and graduate students—is an equal player when it comes to discussing research and doing the work."]]>
By the age of about 12, this search was one of my favorite things. That love of language blossomed into more. I was a huge fan of hip-hop music and through that art, I was introduced to poetry. I was amazed by the dexterity of the language exhibited by my favorite rappers and poets and I decided to try my hand at writing.
At 13, I reluctantly entered my first poetry slam. The poetry slam, Louder Than a Bomb, is the major youth poetry festival in Chicago. The talent of the top performers astounded me and inspired me to continue writing diligently. Throughout high school, I was recognized as a finalist in that competition and then in 2008, to win it as an individual. I went on to compete at the International Youth Poetry Slam, Brave New Voices, and be a finalist there.
When it came time for me to choose a college, my writing was a major factor. I wanted a place that would challenge me academically and allow me to study and develop my creative writing skills. I wanted a place that would supplement and enhance my knowledge of literature and teach me how to appreciate classic canonical works as much as I had grown to appreciate contemporary poetry.
I've found that ideal environment being an English major in the College of Arts and Science at Vanderbilt. The creative writing program here has given me support and guidance in my writing and I know I'm an exponentially better writer after my Vanderbilt experience. It wasn't always easy but my professors have guided me into bringing the same sort of effort and energy to the page that I bring on the stage.
Vanderbilt is a miraculous community. I remember being skeptical when I applied. I felt like it might be too Southern or homogenous to be comfortable for a young black kid from Chicago. What I've found in Vanderbilt is a place that welcomes and engages all. Vanderbilt is a home to all who come to 21st and West End. It is a place that has challenged my perceptions about people, education, and myself, and I am a better person for those challenges.
During my sophomore year, a documentary, Louder Than a Bomb, premiered and began making the rounds at various film festivals. The movie followed the 2008 poetry slam competition that I was part of in high school. The film profiled me and a few other participants. Since it premiered in March 2010, the film has won 17 festival prizes, including 10 audience awards. I've had the opportunity to travel all over the U.S. and Canada promoting the documentary and working with kids. I'm looking forward to traveling internationally, as the film has been shown across Europe and Africa. This has added another layer to the whirlwind of going away for school and has been an amazing experience in itself.
I'm a senior now. I'll be attending the University of Michigan for graduate school in creative writing next year. In the long run I hope to be a professor and also work with youth and creative arts to afford young people the same sort of outlets that were so vital to my education.]]>
High school students from Tennessee got a taste of college research when they made solar cells using blackberry juice and measured the electrical power that the cells produced. Students from nine schools participated in daylong field trips to the Stevenson Center to get a hands-on introduction to nanotechnology and how it might lead to more efficient, less expensive devices for solar power. The solar cell project involved mashing and extracting juice from blackberries, soaking an electrode in the juice, and clipping it with another electrode covered with graphite to make a solar cell. The crude devices produce about enough to power a small electronic calculator, but they can give a person a nice shock, says Scott Niezgoda, a chemistry graduate student who works on the project. The educational outreach program was started this year by the Vanderbilt Institute of Nanoscale Science and Engineering, directed by Sandra Rosenthal, Jack and Pamela Egan Professor of Chemistry.]]>
Tung, a bioarchaelogist, studies past cultures through the clues found in mummies, skeletal remains and other artifacts. In addition to her own research and teaching, she worked with 27 different students on independent research projects and theses both in Nashville and in far-off lands.
Established by the Nashville Chapter of the Vanderbilt Alumni Association in 1963, the chancellor-selected award is given annually to the faculty member most contributing to undergraduate student–faculty relationships outside the classroom.]]>
Four outstanding professors in the College of Arts and Science have been awarded endowed chairs, one of the most prestigious honors a university can bestow. The professors were honored as some of the university's most distinguished faculty and recognized for academic achievements and ongoing work. The new chair holders are John G. Geer, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of Political Science; Jon H. Kaas, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of Psychology; Peter Lake, Martha Rivers Ingram Professor; and David E. Lewis, William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Political Science. Their recognition brings the number of endowed chairs established in the College of Arts and Science to 94. Vanderbilt has a major university initiative to increase the number of endowed chair holders in support of recruiting and retaining top faculty.]]>
Arts and Science senior Zack Terrill was one of more than 12,000 undergraduates competing for just 15 spots available in the annual Jeopardy! College Championship and went on to finish as one of the competition's top three winners. Terrill, a double major in chemistry and philosophy from Winter Springs, Fla., beat out competitors from schools such as Duke, Columbia, George Washington University, Harvard, MIT and Stanford to finish third overall and collect $25,000. A runner and member of Vanderbilt's fencing club, Terrill plans on teaching math in Nashville in the fall.
The Vanderbilt University Board of Trust honored seven College of Arts and Science faculty with emeriti status this spring. Those honored were Tracy Barrett, senior lecturer in Italian, emerita; Ford F. Ebner, professor of psychology, emeritus; Leonard Feldman, Stevenson Professor of Physics, emeritus; Robert Fox, professor of psychology, emeritus; Thomas A. Gregor, professor of anthropology, emeritus; Gary Jensen, professor of sociology, emeritus; and Wallace LeStourgeon, professor of biological sciences, emeritus.]]>
Junior Valerie Kuznik's reading list reflects her interests in Spanish and communication studies. In addition to material for class, she just finished
—Alex Wagner, junior, mathematics
—Bryann DaSilva, senior, economics
—Paulette Lynch, manager, chemistry storeroom
—Rachel Witt, senior, anthropology
—Sebastian Rogers, junior, anthropology]]>
When it comes to researching proteins, the fundamental molecules of biology, anyway. College of Arts and Science researchers have created the largest human-designed protein contain 242 amino acids, more than doubling the previous record. The super-sized protein, FLR, is a computer model of the protein that creates the amino acid histidine. Associate Professor of Chemistry Jens Meiler and his team used algorithms and 400 processors of the supercomputer at Vanderbilt's Advanced Computing Center for Research and Education to engineer large proteins with shapes unseen in nature. "This gives us the tools we need to create new, more effective antibodies and other beneficial proteins," Meiler says.]]>
Senior Justin Menestrina had more than a grade to worry about when he submitted his senior honors project in physics—he was also submitting his research as a paper to the very prestigious journal, Physical Review D.
"It is virtually unheard of for an undergraduate to be a co-author, let alone the lead author of a paper that will appear in Physical Review D," says David Weintraub, professor of astronomy. Yet Menestrina's "Dark Radiation from Particle Decays during Big Bang Nucleosynthesis," co-authored by Professor of Physics Robert Scherrer, was published by the journal recently.
Menestrina studied the effect of particles decaying in the early universe on the production of elements during the first few minutes of the Big Bang. The physics major says that the ability of new technologies to make precise measurements of the radiation left over from the Big Bang has allowed established ideas about the universe to be experimentally tested. His paper attempted to reconcile some surprising discrepancies between what has long been believed about the universe and what the experiments have actually found.]]>
Tepper is an associate professor of sociology and associate director of the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise and Public Policy at Vanderbilt. In his book, Not Here, Not Now, Not That! Protests over Art and Culture in America, he makes the case that art is most relevant when people care enough to fight over it. Tepper did not come by his conclusion idly. He examined more than 800 conflicts across 71 U.S. cities, studying fights over visual art, film, music, theater, history exhibits and books.
In an interview on PBS NewsHour's "Art Beat," he noted a correlation between social change and protest. "The argument in the book is that when people feel unsettled by the rate of social change, when the things around them are changing fast—economics, demographics, technology—art becomes something that they fight over as a way to reassert their values, reassert a sense of who their community is and where they fit into their community," he said. "Art becomes this amazing arena in which people negotiate their differences of opinions around the contours of their expressive lives together."
A good scrap over art can be good for the community. "I think in the future, going forward, as our cultural world gets noisier, as there are more things to offend more people, that there will be more opportunities for people to work together to figure out which forms of expressions are good representations of our community and which ones we don't feel we're ready for or represent us well," Tepper told PBS.
Touch gloves and come out of your corners fighting.]]>
In the Middle Ages, people who felt disconnected from their own bodies would probably have been subject to exorcism. Today, modern medicine prescribes pills to banish such sensations from patients' brains. Research led by Sohee Park, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of Psychology, sheds new light on this common symptom of schizo-phrenia and suggests that patients may benefit from an alternative type of treatment—dance.
Park, along with doctoral candidate Katharine Thakkar, MA'08, and research analysts Heathman Nichols, BA'10, and Lindsey Gilling McIntosh, BA'11, measured schizophrenics' deficient sense of body ownership by employing a procedure known as the rubber hand illusion. The researchers placed a rubber hand in front of each subject while hiding one of the subject's own hands from view. As researchers stroked each hand simultaneously, subjects were asked to estimate the position of their hidden hand using a ruler atop the device hiding it."After a while, patients with schizophrenia begin to 'feel' the rubber hand and disown their own hand. They also experience their real hand as closer to the rubber hand," Park explains. "Healthy people get this illusion too, but weakly. Some don't get it at all." The susceptibility of schizophrenia patients to the rubber hand illusion suggests that they have a more flexible body representation and weakened sense of self compared to healthy people.
The findings may mean that movement therapy, which trains people to be focused and centered on their own bodies via some forms of yoga and dance, might help some of the more than 2.2 million people diagnosed with the mental disorder. "Exercise is inexpensive and obviously has a broad range of beneficial effects, so if it can also reduce the severity of schizophrenia, it is all to the good," Park says.
She says that, decades ago, schizophrenics' weakened body awareness was considered "[one of] the core features of schizophrenia…but in recent years much of the emphasis has been on cognitive functions." This research, published in Public Library of Science ONE, brings the body back into the mind of the psychological community. It also may offer schizophrenia patients the age-old solution for mind-body disconnection put forth by Lady Gaga in 2008: "just dance."]]>
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Would you refuse to drink bottled water if it would help your yet-to-be-born great grandchild?
That's a delicate balance—the contemporary demand for immediate gratification and the responsibility to secure and protect resources for the future. From debates about oil drilling in the Arctic to the use of reusable bags, the tension between having it now and having enough for later generations crosses all spectrums.
Understanding and managing these competing issues has been the topic of the Sustainability Project, a yearlong Vanderbilt-wide exploration under the aegis of the College of Arts and Science's American Studies program and funded by the College of Arts and Science's Fant Fund.
Sustainability—broadly defined as meeting the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs—is the most pressing issue of the 21st century, says Teresa Goddu, associate professor of English and director of American studies. "The ultimate goal of the Sustainability Project is to create a campuswide conversation that emboldens Vanderbilt's efforts toward sustainability while deepening our understanding of what we are working toward."
Dean Carolyn Dever puts it more directly. "We're applying the full diversity of Vanderbilt's academic expertise to one of the most complex and urgent human challenges of our time," Dever says. "In the year to come and for many years ahead, our shared work on sustainability will change this campus and the world for the better."
The initiative began with the Cumberland Project, a spring 2011 two-day intensive workshop for faculty. Faculty from various schools and across campus met to discuss sustainability and to develop curricula that incorporated the topic. A second workshop held May 2012 carried the project forward. While the Sustainability Project will conclude officially in 2013, a new minor in environmental and sustainability studies was recently approved by Arts and Science faculty.
A concurrent goal was to create course collaborations between the sciences and humanities that discussed sustainability as a societal issue. More than 30 courses were offered, ranging from Water and Social Justice in Bangladesh, taught by faculty from Earth and environmental sciences and political science, to The Psychology of Sustainability and even an intensive elementary Spanish course with a sustainability focus.
For Dana Nelson, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English, delving deeply into a compelling topic by drawing on resources across disciplines represents the best of a liberal arts education.
"Fundamentally, the Sustainability Project opens pathways where students learn to speak in the languages of other disciplines," says Nelson, who is also a professor of American studies and women and gender studies. "Doing so opens them to new ways of thinking and seeing the world around them."Nelson's fall 2011 class, Writing for an Endangered World, captured both the multidisciplinary ground of American studies and the core objectives of the Sustainability Project. Using works ranging from Henry David Thoreau to Barbara Kingsolver, she challenged students to think and write persuasively about the allocation and distribution of common resources.
In the spring semester, she and John Ayers, chair of Earth and environmental sciences, taught a graduate seminar exploring society's ability to manage valuable resources in common and the role of government, corporations and other institutions in protecting those resources in a fair, equitable way.
Such issues inspired Katie Ullmann, a rising senior and American studies major, to look closely at the environment, climate change and resource scarcity within the context, ethics and morals of American culture and history. Ullman, an environmentalist since high school, spent the spring 2012 semester in South Africa, where she focused on urbanization and ways to reduce individuals' environmental impact through shared consumption and space.
"The Sustainability Project has changed my viewpoint," she says. "I've always felt one person could make a difference. At the same time, however, Sustainability Project speakers often stressed collective action and that helped me see how much top-down environmental change we need to expedite the cultural shift to more sustainable practices in America."
Beyond the classroom, speakers such as Peter Gleick, cofounder of the Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment and Security, and Bill McKibben, environmentalist and author of Eaarth and The End of Nature, brought environmental discussion to public forums on campus.Road trips—open to any Vanderbilt student but a core component in American studies courses—took participants to Hindman, Ky., to learn firsthand about the impact of mountain top removal, an environmentally contentious method of coal mining. Other activities included visiting the water reclamation operation at Metro Nashville's Water Treatment Plant and exploring environmental justice in Nashville.
Yearlong green lunches cosponsored with the university's Sustainability and Environmental Management Office addressed practical topics ranging from cooking with local foods to composting and alternative transportation. One symposium explored sustainability in connection with legal issues and another with creative writing. The Film Studies program and campus film series sponsored films that involved sustainability issues.
Awareness and action galvanized students who participated, including some who began studying the topic even before the project was officially launched. Jill Vaum, BA'11, took a course on water in American studies last year. She says the topic opened her eyes to numerous ideas that previously had not been on her radar, including the environmental impact of fracking—a controversial method for retrieving oil—to water rights and their intersection with religious beliefs.
Vaum says she's become her family's moral environmental compass, advocating against beverages in disposable plastic bottles and for using recyclable shopping bags. "Now, when I hear stories on the environment, I'm interested and I'm taking small steps in my own life to lessen my environmental impact," Vaum says. "Change is fundamentally about one person making a different decision."]]>
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Answer: Viewing the exterior staircase leading to the Science and Engineering Library in Stevenson.
This issue of Arts and Science offers a worldview of the Vanderbilt College of Arts and Science: demonstrating the impact of our school in the world at large, and the impact of the world at large on our school. From my vantage point in Kirkland Hall, Arts and Science seems at once vast and localized. Approximately 4 percent of our undergraduates and 23 percent of our graduate students hail from countries other than the U.S., yet they are all at home here on this beautiful residential campus where their courses, research and service activities are emphatically global in emphasis and effects. The work of our faculty touches every continent on this planet. And our community as a whole has dedicated itself to a yearlong emphasis on sustainability and the environment that addresses the future of the planet itself.
My own travels on behalf of Arts and Science in the past year have extended from Melbourne, Australia, to Aix-en-Provence, France, to Belfast, Northern Ireland, and throughout North America. Yet wherever I travel on behalf of Arts and Science, I feel entirely at home. Meeting far-flung friends who love this place as I do, and advocating for Arts and Science within new environments, partnerships and possibilities—these are privileges unique to my job. Invariably I return to campus inspired by our current work and our future potential, rededicated to our mission of excellence in research, teaching and service, wherever that takes us.
Sometimes the most profound lessons take place fairly close to home.
On a crisp, clear day in the fall, I took a road trip with three good friends: Mona Frederick, executive director of the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities, and Arts and Science alumni Will (BA'66, JD'69) and Lillias Johnston (BA'67). We drove the 50 miles or so up to the Tennessee–Kentucky state line to the small town of Guthrie, Ky., where we had the warmest of welcomes from Jeane Moore and Melba Smith, two of the founders of the Robert Penn Warren Birthplace House Museum. As you will read in "Birthplace of Greatness," Jeane, Melba and a small team of friends have dedicated years of their lives to the establishment and maintenance of a beautiful museum in the birthplace of Robert Penn Warren, poet laureate, three-time Pulitzer Prize winner and Vanderbilt alumnus and professor.
In that house, among fascinating exhibits and memorabilia, hangs a simple ring with the keys from Warren's room from his days as an Arts and Science undergraduate.
From his home in Guthrie to his home on campus to his home in the pantheon of U.S. letters, Robert Penn Warren was a poet, a novelist and a journalist. Warren was a master at connecting the local and the global, the quotidian concerns of small-town life with the global questions of his day. Realizing this profound insight was made possible only by the efforts of Jeane, Melba and the citizens of Guthrie, who have dedicated themselves to preserving Warren's legacy within their community on behalf of the world at large. They invited us in and welcomed us to new insights about Warren as a person, a poet, a local boy, a great man, a son, a father, a friend.
No matter where we go in life, we all start somewhere. I will never forget the sight of those room keys hanging on a hook on a wall in a house in Guthrie, Ky. What doors they opened in the life that ensued.
Carolyn Dever
Larry Bartels, May Werthan Shayne Professor of Public Policy and Social Science, and Randolph Blake, Centennial Professor of Psychology, were elected to the National Academy of Science. Election is considered one of the highest honors accorded U.S. scientists.
Richard Blackett, Andrew Jackson Professor of American History, has been named the Harold Vyvyan Harmsworth Visiting Professor of American History at Oxford University for 2013-14.
Colin Dayan, Robert Penn Warren Professor in the Humanities, has been elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Vivien Green Fryd, professor of history of art, has been awarded the visiting professorship at the John F. Kennedy Institute at the Freie Universität Berlin for fall 2012.
The Smithsonian has appointed Gary Gerstle, James Stahlman Professor of History, as Goldman Sachs Visiting Scholar for 2012. He will work with curators to develop a permanent exhibit on immigration for the National Museum of American History.
Joseph H. Hamilton, Landon C. Garland Distinguished Professor of Physics, has been elected a member of the Academia Europaea, a nongovernmental association of independent scientists and scholars in arts and sciences.
Julian F. Hillyer, assistant professor of biological sciences, is the 2012 recipient of the Recognition Award in Insect Physiology, Biochemistry and Toxicology from the Southeastern branch of the Entomological Society of America. The award recognizes and encourages innovation in insect research.
Associate Professor of Political Science Cindy Kam received the Emerging Scholar Award from the Elections, Voting Behavior and Public Opinion section of the American Political Science Association and the Erik H. Erikson Early Career Award from the International Society of Political Psychology.
Jonathan Lamb, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities, and William Luis, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of Spanish, received 2012 Guggenheim Fellowship Awards. The two are among only 181 scholars, artists and scientists chosen from nearly 3,000 applicants.
Sokrates T. Pantelides, University Distinguished Professor of Physics and Engineering, was honored for career achievement at the 27th Panhellenic Conference on Solid State Physics and Materials Science, held at his birthplace, Limassol, Cyprus.
M. L. Sandoz, senior lecturer in communication studies, was named 2011 SEC Debate Director of the Year.
Mitchell Seligson, Centennial Professor of Political Science and director of the Latin American Public Opinion Project, has been confirmed to the General Assembly of the Inter-American Institute of Human Rights, the IIHR's highest governing body. He is one of only four U.S. members.]]>
For some, it was the fulfillment of a lifelong dream. Others fell into jobs and found a passion. No matter what drew them, though, College of Arts and Science graduates working as staff on Capitol Hill share one commonality: their Vanderbilt experiences equipped them well for Washington's political world.
"I don't know if Vanderbilt creates it, or if the same type of person is drawn to—and successful at—Vanderbilt that is successful here," says Conrad Schatte, BA'97, an economics and communication studies graduate who served as legislative assistant for U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander, BA'62 (Tenn.). "It's the same sort of skills: a balance of the analytical and the personal."
Currently, there are a dozen or more Arts and Science graduates working in Congress. Though specifics vary regarding experience, position or political party, most are legislative staffers handling a range of tasks, including monitoring legislation on specific topics (most will specialize in more than one), corresponding with constituents, communicating with the press, and serving as liaison with the elected official's committee assignments and those who lobby and advocate on connected issues.
Some, like Jon Boughtin, BA'05, majored in political science. Now Boughtin is a senior legislative assistant for Rep. Bill Owens (N.Y.), a role he describes as "entirely policy." Owens is a member of the Armed Services Committee and Boughtin compiles briefings on bills and assists in writing legislation.
"Your degree matters," Boughtin says. "But a lot of people tell you that college is as much about learning how to think as what you need to know. At Vanderbilt, there were a host of professors keyed into the local politics. Professors are willing to sit down with you and give you ideas, 'Try interning here, look there.'"
Even without a field of study that directly correlated to her current role as health policy advisor to Alexander, a liberal arts education helped Mary-Sumpter Lapinski, BA'97. "We do a lot of writing, and I write very well because of my education," the English and French graduate says. "When I was in college, everyone said, 'What are you going to do with that major? Teach?' I said, 'You need communication skills in every industry.' I work with language every day, writing briefing documents, legislation, and memos and editing press releases. I had good training."
But a lot of preparation happened outside of the classroom as well. "The rigorous academic environment teaches you that you've got to buckle down and maintain focus," says Charlie Keller, BA'99. A political science graduate, Keller serves as chief of staff for Rep. Sandy Adams (Fla.). "One of the things I did at Vanderbilt was spread myself thin: club track and field, varsity cross country, alcohol education program and fraternity. I still graduated on time," Keller says. "Doing all of that you have to truly learn to balance your time, even with all the fun things there are to do in Nashville. Putting all of those into one coherent mix prepares you for the future."
Political science and public policy major Lindsay Mosshart, BA'05, says it was the mix of people she encountered that has helped most in her Washington work. "I really value the exposure I got to individuals from all parts of the country. I learned to be more patient and understanding of others' geopolitical views and political rationale by listening to my classmates discuss politics and world events," says Mosshart, a senior legislative assistant for Rep. Gene Green (Texas). "In my job, I work with different personalities every day, and this background constantly comes in handy by allowing me to better collaborate and coalition build across the aisle and with constituent groups."
Located in a state capital, Vanderbilt has a natural connection for politics, with students able to engage politically early on. Additionally, while Tennessee is deep red, Nashville is not, offering opportunity for those on both sides of the political spectrum.
That is, perhaps, one reason Washington has such a strong network of Commodores. Reps. Leonard Lance, JD'77, (N.J.) and Ben Quayle, JD'02, (Ariz.) are graduates of Vanderbilt School of Law. Alexander and Rep. Steve Cohen, BA'71, (Tenn.) are Arts and Science alumni. Numerous former senators and representatives also have Vanderbilt ties, including former Vice President and Senator Al Gore and Rep. Jim Cooper (Tenn.), who teaches at Owen.
In an environment that can radically change every two years—with Democratic staffers looking for work one cycle and Republican staffers the next—building strong connections is a valuable currency. Often young staffers land their first job working for their home-state senator or the representative from their district.
For Lindsey Ward, BA'02, Vanderbilt itself provided the opportunity to secure her first Washington job as a legislative assistant. The history major worked on Alexander's campaign staff immediately after graduation and when he was re-elected, "Vanderbilt provided my connection to Sen. Alexander. If I didn't have that, I seriously doubt they would have hired me," she says. Ward now serves as professional staff for the Senate Rules Committee.
Allison Martin, BA'98, graduated with a degree in political science. She previously worked for Senators Fred Thompson and Bill Frist, both of Tennessee and who employed a large number of Vanderbilt graduates. "We all figured out that we had a shared background and that made me feel a lot more at home," says Martin, a legislative assistant to Alexander.
Martin, Lapinski and Schatte all were in the College of Arts and Science around the same time, but didn't know each other. "Conrad and I figured out that we were at some of the same events and had some of the same friends," Lapinski says. Lapinski and Ward also were in the same sorority, though separated by a few years.
Having that connection to the familiar in an unfamiliar town—one known for its sometimes ruthless politics—provided comfort. "It makes it helpful that everyone looks back so fondly," says economics/history graduate Nick Magallanes, BA'08, and another of Alexander's legislative aides. "You have good memories and good stories to exchange of those times at Vanderbilt. I didn't overlap with some of the others in the office, but it does provide a connection to be able to talk about the same places and experiences."
It also can provide a powerful network of mentors. Drew Brandewie, BA'07, who now works as press secretary for a senator, found that out when searching for a job a few years ago. The communication studies graduate met with an older alumnus who brainstormed job opportunities with him, even though they hadn't met previously. "He did it solely because I was a fellow VU grad," Brandewie says. "A skillful networker will go a long way here, and relating to others through VU can be an excellent way to forge relationships no matter what field you're in."
Scores of Vanderbilt alumni work throughout Capitol Hill and many, many more in the organizations that work with the government.
"When we need to reach out to a certain office, or an agency, it helps to have someone that you have that shared connection of Vanderbilt with," Keller says.
It also helps that Arts and Science graduates previously in Congress work throughout Washington. Jennifer Romans, BA'03, first joined then-Senate Majority Leader Frist's health care team after internships for a pharmaceutical company and in Frist's office. She is currently senior director of federal affairs for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, where she uses what she learned from stints with Frist and Sen. Jon Kyl (Ariz.) to work with health policy issues and entitlements. She made the switch to the private sector after the grueling health care reform battle.
In her present role, as in her Capitol Hill experience, the English and political science graduate continues to use valuable lessons learned at Vanderbilt. "Every day, my job requires me to think critically and analytically, develop creative solutions, devise political strategies, and effectively communicate ideas," Romans says. "I am thankful that my A&S degree helped me develop these capabilities and gave me the tools necessary to lead, achieve and succeed."]]>
—Keith Neely, junior, history
As you can tell, I like reading about the American Civil War.
—Arthur Johnsen, associate professor of the practice of managerial studies
—Newton Adkins, sophomore, Latin American studies]]>
Congratulations to these faculty members who have been promoted to new positions and received tenure.
If the $1.94 billion raised in Vanderbilt's recently concluded Shape the Future fundraising campaign seems like a mind-boggling figure, then consider this. Each gift has a purpose and fills a need. Each gift makes possible someone's education, research, experience or growth. Alumni, parents, donors, corporations and foundations, faculty, staff and friends contributed more than $165 million to the College of Arts and Science as part of Shape the Future. These examples—there are hundreds more—demonstrate how generosity and belief in a liberal arts education are shaping Arts and Science now and in the future.
This baby alligator and about 40 of its siblings decided the first day of fall classes would be a great time to hatch. Ph.D. student Duncan Leitch, BA'06, helped the alligator break out of its egg, much as a mother alligator would. Leitch, a student in the Vanderbilt Brain Institute's Neuroscience Graduate program, studies American alligators under the direction of Ken Catania, Stevenson Professor of Biological Sciences. They're interested in the reptiles' ability to sense movement using specialized sensory receptors along the edge of their jaws and how that might relate to neural processes in humans.
Behind slammed doors, most teenagers fervently wish at least once that they could belong to another family. One that was hipper, permissive, richer—somehow more in line with their needs. Turns out a group of fungi—23 genes to be exact—successfully pulled off this swap, switching families millions of years ago. The discovery of this leap by a College of Arts and Science researcher is helping recast Darwin's lasting metaphor of the tree of life.
In Origin of Species, Charles Darwin diagrammed his theory of the evolutionary process from parent to child, down through generation after generation (now known as vertical gene transfer), resulting in Darwin's famous tree of life.
But a recent discovery by Antonis Rokas, assistant professor of biological sciences, reveals that Darwin's sketch may not show the full picture of evolution. Rokas' current research focuses on how fungi change over generations, leading to better understanding of the evolutionary relationships among living organisms and how diversity has evolved. The Rokas Lab found that millions of years ago, a cluster of 23 genes jumped intact from a strain of mold commonly found on starchy foods to an unrelated strain that lives in dung and specializes in breaking down plant fibers.
He and research associate Jason Slot reported their discovery in the journal Current Biology earlier this year. Their finding came as a major surprise to scientists because there are only a handful of cases in recent evolutionary history where this type of gene transfer between organisms, known as horizontal gene transfer, has been found in complex cells like those in plants, animals and fungi. Rokas' findings have even made "Sminton," a science-based Web comic strip that riffs off recent newsworthy scientific publications.
"The fungi are telling us something important about evolution…something we didn't know," Rokas says.
The interspecies transfer that Rokas discovered suggests how fungi developed their remarkable metabolic diversity, including the ability to produce highly toxic compounds. It also supports the notion that similar jumping genes played a significant role in fungal evolution. The fungal kingdom currently presents the best place for genomic research because complete genome sequences are already available from more than 100 species.
The research was supported by funds provided by the Searle Scholars Program and the National Science Foundation.
Read more about their research.]]>
The next time you pull out your smartphone, take a moment to appreciate the tremendous amount of mathematics that it embodies.
Math is involved in converting the sound of your voice into radio signals that connect you to your friends. It is used to create the complex shapes of the fonts in your email messages. In fact, all the phone's functions are performed by executing basic logical operations on binary code, strings of ones and zeros.
The sleek slab of glass, metal and plastic is an appropriate symbol of just how dependent modern society has become on its most complex art form. There are very few aspects of life today that can function efficiently without the liberal application of mathematics. At its base, mathematics is one of the truest creations of the human intellect. As Albert Einstein put it, "Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas."
In the last 15 years, Vanderbilt's mathematics department has played an increasingly prominent role in the world of mathematics. It has quietly transformed itself from a department whose majors were mainly concerned with getting teaching jobs in regional colleges into a leading math research department that turns out students who snag jobs at top universities.
"We have moved up substantially in the world," says Dietmar Bisch, chair and professor of mathematics.
Mathematicians don't make statements like this without proof. One of Bisch's strongest pieces of evidence is the department's performance in last fall's evaluation of the nation's graduate programs by the National Research Council.
In the NRC's 1995 ranking, Vanderbilt's math program was placed at 84, toward the bottom of the heap. According to department veterans, the old ranking didn't accurately reflect its quality. But they are quite happy with the new report that places the program squarely among the top 20 percent of the 127 Ph.D. math programs that it analyzed.
The second piece of evidence Bisch cites is the recent hire of Fields Medal winner, Vaughan Jones, from the University of California, Berkeley. Awarded every four years, the Fields Medal is generally considered the Nobel Prize of mathematics.
Jones himself says that his move to the College of Arts and Science was due in part to "the positive atmosphere at Vanderbilt compared to all the negativity in California." The new Distinguished Professor of Mathematics also cites the quality of the department and the greater ease with which he will be able to get things done here as major reasons for joining the school.
When he arrived in August, Jones added considerable strength to one of the department's theoretical research groups, the Center for Noncommutative Geometry and Operator Algebras. The center is directed by Bisch and includes Stevenson Professor of Mathematics Gennadi Kasparov, Assistant Professor of Mathematics Jesse Peterson, and Professors of Mathematics Guoliang Yu, Dechao Zheng and Daoxing Xia.
They study the properties of "non-commutative" spaces where, for example, 4 times 3 does not equal 3 times 4. These advanced theories describe the properties of subatomic particles and a number of other scientifically important spaces. Such spaces also play an important role in the latest manifestation of string theory, which is based on the idea that elementary particles are tiny vibrating strings instead of infinitesimal spheres.
Another theoretical group consists of Centennial Professors of Mathematics Alexander Olshanskiy and Mark Sapir, Professor of Mathematics Mike Mihalik and Associate Professor of Mathematics Denis Osin, recognized experts in group theory, which has its origins in geometry. Group theory is a powerful way of studying geometrical objects and has a number of applications ranging from crystallization to DNA replication to cryptography. Where geometry focuses on objects like the rectangle, group theory concentrates on operations like rotation and translation that these objects undergo.
Some mathematical research is more down-to-earth, and the department works in several applied fields. One is constructive approximation, which specializes in finding simple techniques that approximate the behavior of complex mathematical expressions. In the Center for Constructive Approximation, Professors of Mathematics Ed Saff and Doug Hardin developed a new method for evenly distributing points on curved surfaces, a procedure with applications ranging from digitizing curved surfaces to modeling the coastal effects of tsunamis. The center, made up of Stevenson Professor of Mathematics Larry Schumaker, Professors of Mathematics Saff, Hardin, Mike Neamtu and Akram Aldroubi, and Assistant Professor Alex Powell, also publishes Constructive Approximation, one of the world's most highly cited math journals.
A key element in the department's growing reputation has been an annual lecture honoring Professor Baylis Shanks, MA'40, and education administrator Olivia Shanks, MA'39, a couple who played major roles at Vanderbilt from the 1950s to the 1970s. The lecture, which emphasizes a different field of mathematics each year, allows the department to invite top mathematicians from around the world for an accompanying research conference that has developed a considerable following in mathematics circles.
It was an invitation to speak at the Shanks lecture that led to a collaboration with mathematician, Fields medalist Alain Connes of the College de France and the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques (IHES). For nine years, Connes has directed an annual spring institute that combines lectures and workshops, attracting both senior and junior mathematicians to Nashville. (Connes also serves as Distinguished Professor of Math-ematics here at Vanderbilt.) Because of these activities, the department now hosts 300 to 400 visitors annually, an exceptional number for a math department of its size.
Another factor in the department's growth was Bisch's proposal to replace the short-term lecturers who taught many of math's 160 courses with post-doctoral researchers. This change freed up research time for graduate students, improved the quality of instructions and enhanced the research ambiance in the department significantly. It also brought the College of Arts and Science to the attention of departments nationwide looking for positions for their graduates.
This growing stature has attracted increasingly high quality students. At the undergraduate level, it recently added a new honors track specifically for students interested in pursuing careers in math research and its graduate students and postdoctoral fellows have been extremely successful in finding jobs despite the tough job market.]]>
James "Jim" Seuss, BA'85, has been surrounded by luxury throughout his career.
Holding positions of leadership with Tiffany and Co., Harry Winston Inc., Cole Haan, Stella McCartney Ltd., and currently, high-end watch retailer Tourneau, Seuss knows about the finer things. But to him, the most luxurious items of all don't have much to do with expense. Luxury to Seuss is found instead in a home-cooked meal with quality ingredients (including, perhaps, a spice brought back from a trip to Morocco), time spent with Scarlet, his beloved Welsh springer spaniel puppy, or even just sleeping past 6 in the morning.
"For me," he says, "it's about the experience, not the cost."
Looking back, he's amassed a wealth of experiences since his days studying history in the College of Arts and Science.
Seuss took a job in a men's haberdashery while a high school student in Memphis, Tenn. He was drawn to quality and branding even then, he says, and knew that later he would want to go to business school. He came to Vanderbilt with several friends, seeking a good, diverse liberal arts background that would offer a strong base for a future MBA. That came via George Washington University, but it was his time at Vanderbilt, he says, that opened doors to uncharted territory: an educational program that landed him in China.
"One of the professors from Vanderbilt put me in touch with the program since I was interested in international business," Seuss says. "It was concentrated on Asia Pacific, or Far Eastern history, as it was called at the time. The program was geared toward archaeology and language, and gave me further exposure."
It also lit a fire about business potential in that part of the globe; when Seuss took his first job in retail in New York City, it was with Tiffany's international division. He began working on Japanese business for the luxury jeweler known by its iconic blue box, eventually opening some 50 stores for Tiffany throughout Asia.
"I stayed with Tiffany for 13 years and decided that would be what I would do: stay in higher-end retail," Seuss says. "Then I just stuck with it."
His latest executive position is as CEO of Tourneau in New York, his first stint with a multibrand retailer rather than a monobrand company.
That offered new challenges and opportunities for growth, he says, and under his careful eye, Tourneau has implemented a wide-ranging plan to rebrand the more than 100-year-old retailer as "friendly, reliable and discreet." The rebranding included the recent opening of a 3,000-square-foot, uniquely designed Madison Avenue location that is intended to eliminate the somewhat intimidating atmosphere of jewelry shops and make watch shopping fun.
Tourneau represents brands like Breitling, Cartier, IWC, Jaeger-LeCoultre, Panerai and Rolex. Typical customers, he says, are in their 30s to 50s, but a growing number of the youngest generation is becoming re-engaged with watches after Gen Y's reliance on cell phones and other technology to track time instead.
"There's a sense of nostalgia about it," he says. "Everything is so modern and automated now, and a watch can represent something else. It's handmade, handcrafted and took six months to produce. That represents something unique to a generation that's grown up with everything automated."
Seuss' own private watch collection features about 20 pieces, including a Jaeger-LeCoultre that was his grandfather's. He also treasures a Panerai given him by fashion designer Stella McCartney at the second anniversary of their doing business together. "It's engraved with the company and date, which makes it even more special to me," he says. "There are many great pieces that I received at great moments."
Leading companies known for quality and excellence, Seuss has a passion for doing things to the best of his ability—and pushing others to do the same. Ask him what people would be surprised to know about him, and he responds that he's not quite the perfectionist that some would believe. Not only that, but even with his haberdashery background, his own closet isn't as organized as it could be, he admits.
For someone who has held so many high-profile positions—he was president and CEO of Cole Haan, president of Harry Winston and CEO of Stella McCartney—Seuss has kept a rather low-key media profile. It's not that he seeks privacy, per se, but rather that he has aimed to put his employers first.
"I've always wanted the company to speak more than one person," he says. "Whether that's Harry Winston or Cole Haan, I've wanted to push the company first."
Those companies have afforded him the chance to visit more than 60 countries—though not yet the Galapagos Islands, he laments—as well as enjoy his personal pursuits of waterskiing, snow skiing, scuba diving and playing the cello. He has studied a half-dozen languages and maintains the love of Chinese culture and archeology that deepened during his time in the College of Arts and Science—including being an avid collector of contemporary Chinese art and 17th century maps.
"I've always been very curious about other parts of the world, other cultures, other civilizations," he says. "I've always thought there was so much to be learned from history."
His own history has been a rewarding one, Seuss says, made all the richer by being curious, asking questions and continuing to dig a little deeper. His years at Vanderbilt encouraged him to care about others, to enjoy himself and to be smart with his time, he says, and it's that last thing that's most luxurious of all.
"Some things just have to fall by the wayside," he says, admitting that his schedule has caused him to lose touch with friends and give up some activities he formerly enjoyed. All the same, he still encourages the pursuit of having as many different experiences as possible, including traveling, reading, learning and listening—not to mention, every so often, marking the time on a meaningful watch.]]>
I didn't finish the race. Forty hours into the Death Race and a mere five hours from the end, I quit. In my four years as a Vanderbilt athlete, I had never failed to make it to the finish line. I had faced disappointment, failed to meet goals, even finished last, but I had never simply stopped. Now that the haze of physical and mental exhaustion has worn off, I'm left to question what happened that Sunday morning and to somehow reconcile everything leading up to those last few moments.
The Spartan Death Race is a 48-hour endurance competition that takes place each year in Pittsfield, Vt. The organizers are notorious for keeping the race details secret until the last minute and challenging competitors with unexpected and extreme physical and mental feats. They boast that only a miniscule number of competitors complete the event. Its website is www.youmaydie.com.
I have always enjoyed pushing myself. I majored in economics in the College of Arts and Science while also running track and cross-country at Vanderbilt. I learned to balance the high-pressure demands of being an SEC athlete while thriving academically, challenged by interesting professors and subjects while competing as both an individual and team member. I now know how to defend my thoughts on a case (thanks, Professor Damon) as well as how to surge in the final lap (thanks, Coach Keith).
That mindset did not disappear upon graduating. So one day in June, I left work without explaining why I was disappearing for the weekend. Using precious vacation days to suffer would be seemingly illogical to my peers.
The Death Race began on a rainy Friday night in Pittsfield. I was one of 155 participants who filed into the town church for a race debriefing. No one knew what we were about to endure. There was no course map, no set distance and no defined finish line. Tasks were given as the race progressed and everything would soon become a tangle of mind games and physical pain. The possibilities of what might lie ahead were limitless and the anxiety of those in the Pittsfield church tangible; I found myself excited and eager for the race to begin.
After the debriefing, racers were divided into groups and given a circle of large rocks to lift. One clean lift was getting the rock up to your chest and lowering it to the ground. Once around the circle, or 13 clean lifts, was one lap. I was to complete 150 laps, repeating the lift hundreds and hundreds of times for nearly six hours.
The rocks were only the beginning. Sometime during the early morning hours, I was sent walking miles upstream in a cold river, pitch-black except for the headlamps of racers dotting the darkness like fireflies, and silent but for the rush of the current and the occasional splash of a racer losing his footing.
Sunrise found me swimming seven laps across a freezing pond, carrying a lit candle around an open field between laps, silently praying that my body's violent shivering wouldn't extinguish the flame and force me to add a penalty lap.
After splitting a stack of wood, I was sent up a trail carrying a log so heavy I could barely hoist it onto my shoulder…only to carry it back down again after committing a Bible verse to memory. After other tasks, including an eight-hour hike carrying my full pack plus a small log, night set in again.
I was 24 hours into the race. Fatigue, both mental and physical, began to take its toll. A sudden storm rolled in. I faced another mountain hike, marked only by small orange flags hanging in the woods. I plodded along, focusing only on moving forward one step at a time. Then I reached the barbed wire. I remember shining my light ahead and seeing the barbs strung across the path for probably 400 meters. I remember sitting down to rest for a minute before having to maneuver through the spikes.
And then I don't remember much. My friend and teammate for the race later told me that I stopped responding to him, barely speaking and only inching forward as he coaxed me under the wire. I was somewhere in the early stages of hypothermia. Crawling along the dark trail, face inches from pools of mud, I had no choice but to keep moving forward.
I eventually struggled to the top, and after some time warming up at the checkpoint, made it back to the base of the mountain just as the sun rose for the second time. I pressed onward, tasked with cutting down trees, moving more rocks and slowly trudging forward. Fewer than 50 racers, strewn across miles of trail and hours of competition, remained on the course.
Then late Sunday morning, I stopped. I had been competing for over 40 straight hours and was in 12th place. The race officials told me I had more than 15 hours left of the competition. I knew I'd have to sleep before continuing for that long. Monday's workday loomed in front of me. Enough. I shared a congratulatory hug with my teammate and we headed home, confident in our decision and proud of our accomplishment. It was not the finish, but for us it was the end.
I got the call that night.
The race had ended at 45 hours wherever you were on the course, and those remaining 35 racers were told they finished. The finish line was yet another trick.
I was devastated, and for weeks wished I had slept in the rest tent for five hours, essentially tricking the race directors instead of letting them trick me. But that's not the philosophy with which I toed the start line when I wore a gold V on my chest. Nor would it represent the values instilled in me over my Vanderbilt years, during the Arts and Science classes that were my academic barbed wire, when I didn't think I would pass or the easy way out seemed tempting.
I didn't finish the Death Race, but I competed with integrity for 40 hours and pushed my body harder than I thought possible, and I can say that with my head held high.
Gary Jaeger could probably improve the writing in this magazine standing on his head. A philosopher, writing coach and yogi, Jaeger serves as the assistant director of the Writing Studio and senior lecturer in the philosophy department, as well as a yoga instructor at 12 South Yoga in Nashville. After graduating with a bachelor's degree in philosophy and writing from Johns Hopkins University, Jaeger earned a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Chicago. He says his work in philosophy and writing complement each other as both allow him to explore the power of argument while his yoga practice keeps him calm and focused.
I, along with the other directors of the Writing Studio, supervise a staff of around 30 writing consultants who meet one-on-one with people who want to discuss their writing projects. Much of our time as directors goes to training and mentoring our staff, but we also devote some of our energy to forming collaborations with other departments and programs on campus. In addition to our consultation services, the Writing Studio offers writing workshops and other programs like On Writing, where we interview professional writers, and Dinner and Draft, where we invite faculty to discuss their works-in-progress over dinner.
Last year we had 4,102 appointments with 1,687 clients. Most of our clients are undergraduates, but we serve graduate students and faculty as well. Our clients come to us at all stages of the writing process. Clients who are just beginning a paper benefit from being able to talk through their inchoate thoughts. Clients who have already written a draft benefit from having a critical but sympathetic consultant read through that draft and engage them in conversation about the structure and strength of their arguments. We even see graduate students and faculty who are writing dissertations and book-length projects. These clients benefit from having regular meetings with the same consultant who can help keep track of how their projects are developing.
Most students do not realize that academic writing is about making arguments. Each discipline makes arguments in its own way, but at its core all academic work seeks to make a novel contribution to its field by arguing that the current state of play isn't quite good enough.
Busy! During the school year I am up and writing before 5 a.m., sometimes as early as 4. This is the only way I can make any progress on my research and still make it into the office where my days are split between teaching and administrative duties. While on campus, I prepare and teach my classes, have regular meetings with the other directors of the Writing Studio and our collaborators, consult clients, see to the day-to-day operations of the studio, and attend philosophy department events. I also make time for yoga every day. Before coming to campus I practice pranayama (rhythmic control of the breath) for about 30 to 45 minutes. When I get home I practice asana (poses) for 1 ½ to 2 hours.
I mostly teach classes in ethics and political philosophy. I have taught introduction to ethics, contemporary ethical theory, social and political philosophy, contemporary political philosophy, and introduction to philosophy. I have also directed an independent reading course on Indian philosophy.
I went to my first yoga class when I was 16 years old. It was offered as a physical education elective in my high school and seemed like the best option for a 90-pound weakling. I didn't become serious about my yoga practice until I started studying with an Iyengar yoga teacher about 12 years ago. It was significantly more profound and intelligent than any other method I had or have yet to encounter. Although yoga has made me fit, healthy, and nearly eliminated chronic back pain, the biggest reason for doing it is precisely this: it makes me calm, focused and alert. I would say it makes everything else in my busy life possible. I teach it because teaching helps me to learn. This is true of philosophy as well as yoga.
I have had colleagues and graduate students from the philosophy department take my yoga classes, but I don't think I have had a student from one of my philosophy courses take my yoga class. When I was teaching at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, I taught yoga as an academic course. They had an Iyengar yoga program in their dance department and I was allowed to teach a yoga class in addition to philosophy classes as part of my teaching load.]]>
The Commons Center, the student center located in the heart of The Martha Rivers Ingram Commons at Vanderbilt, has a beautiful grand piano in the lobby, a glossy, whalelike monument to music begging to be made. Sometime last September, I first heard it played, and after a second or two of confusion, I realized it was improvisational jazz—and it was good. I walked toward the piano in awe, hearing the musical mist around me swell to a torrent of bluesy riffs gushing from the unidentifiable pianist's fingers. When I found out who was manning the keys, however, I was flabbergasted: locked in frenetic concentration was one of my friends from Math 205. I had no idea he could play piano, much less improvise for 90 minutes straight. His unexpected, outstanding talent—reflective of the depth of Vanderbilt's student body—led me to only one thought:
This is why I love this school.
Six short months before, any statement of the sort seemed a distant pipe dream: As I sallied forth during my high school senior year—happily ready to do battle with everything life's capricious pitcher threw my way—one herculean task remained unfinished: my college choice.
My situation was difficult; I had been admitted to Yale but was awaiting scholarship notifications from other universities—including Vanderbilt's College of Arts and Science. On March 12, 2010, a day I might start celebrating as "Incredibly-Understated-Yet-Life-Changing Email Day," I received word that Vanderbilt had offered me the phenomenal Cornelius Vanderbilt Scholarship. How was I ever going to make up my mind?
On top of that, I had an additional question with which I had to grapple: How was I going to describe my choice to readers around the world?
This question had emerged during a lunchtime phone call in late February 2010, leading to one of those moments I'd never envisioned happening halfway through a ham sandwich: The call was from The New York Times, and they wanted me to outline my college decision-making process as a guest blogger for The Choice, the Times' higher education blog.
It was a once-in-a-lifetime chance, so I enthusiastically signed on—but I was also nervous. After all, the pressure to live up to the Times name was enormous, and I knew that sharing my life with the world would invariably summon the digital peanut gallery. I felt up to the challenge, though, so as I dove into my deliberation—replete with campus visits at Vanderbilt and Yale and talks with students, admissions officers and deans—I made it my goal to have fun with every word going under my evanescent byline.
As spring progressed and I continued my blog series, my gut slowly but surely transitioned to Vanderbilt, my writing surprisingly serving as a means of distilling and clarifying my then-muddled feelings. After announcing my choice, I ended my blog series in late June with a hopeful analogy between a still-unfamiliar Vanderbilt and the Land of Oz, but as I submitted my final post, faint pangs of second-guessing began to settle in. Had I really made the right choice? I had no way of being sure until I arrived in Nashville in the fall. It was a risk, but I felt confident; after all, Dorothy and Toto thrived post-twister, so why wouldn't I?
After finishing a lightning-fast first year in the College of Arts and Science, I turned out to be right; it has been an absolutely incredible start to what ought to be an unforgettable four years. My classes—covering everything from the significance of the nonhuman in German literature to the neuroscientific underpinnings of consciousness—have expanded my worldview and have pushed me in the ways I needed to be pushed. Outside of the classroom, I have also found some of the nicest, most talented people I have ever met: About two weeks into the school year, I auditioned for Vanderbilt Off-Broadway—probably the single best decision I made first semester—and performed in the group's production of the musical Nine. I also moonlighted as vice president of my Commons house, teaming up with administrators to bring a six-band concert to The Ingram Commons' end-of-year festivities.
But to mention what I have done is only part of the story, for I couldn't begin to describe how I have truly lived this first year: sweet potato pancakes shared with friends at the Pancake Pantry; Frisbee on the Peabody Esplanade; impromptu adventures through nighttime Nashville; hall discussions until 3 a.m. on the merits of the humanities; and every waking moment I spent this summer with Vanderbilt's VISAGE program in Costa Rica.
Throughout the year—no matter my exhaustion, stress or Lilliputian concern—I found myself constantly going back to the memory of the epiphany-inducing piano, the wonder of that moment echoed in a cappella concerts and rainforest hikes alike. The more I'm steeped in Vanderbilt, the more I love it—so much so that I applied to be a VUceptor for first-year students this fall. When thinking about the new students in the Class of 2015, I recall my senior year and the stress surrounding my college decision, and a thought comes to mind:
I know I made the right choice. I hope that they, too, will feel the same.]]>
The October after his graduation from the College of Arts and Science was arguably one of the darkest months in Jake Ramsey's life.
Teaching math at Nashville's Maplewood High School through nonprofit organization Teach For America, Ramsey, BA'09, had reached the phase of working in a high-poverty setting that might be labeled "despair."
Less than a third of his students could add or subtract negative numbers, though they weren't far from his own age. Gang members sorted out grievances with a razor fight. One student—who had taken honors geography—called Florida another country.
The economics major was learning, all too well, the unspoken agreement present in many classrooms and one which affected his ability to teach: "It goes like this," Ramsey says. " 'I won't make you do any real work, or stress you in any way, and you don't misbehave.' "
Sure enough, the Teach For America corps member—one of thousands who make a two-year commitment annually toward closing the achievement gap of low-income students by teaching in high-need areas—had moved beyond his initial phase of excitement. It had been followed by disillusionment. The idea of rejuvenation seemed as far away as the possibility of graduation for a high school class with an average grade of 43 out of 100.
"For the first time, I couldn't work hard enough to make things happen," he says. "But the beauty of Teach For America is that you cannot participate in this—you cannot survive those two years—and not be forever changed. You cannot come to know these kids in such a way as I have and not care about education for the rest of your life."
During his two-year stint, Ramsey discovered what many Teach For America alumni do: that investment and belief in students can make a remarkable difference in grades, attitudes and outcomes. Studies consistently show that Teach For America teachers—most of them prepared only by a six-week intensive summer training program rather than a four-year degree in education—have an impact on student achievement that's equal or greater to traditional first-year teachers. The large majority of TFA teachers take part in the 20-year-0ld program immediately after graduation, when the idealistic incentive to change the world might peak.
TFA teachers receive one-on-one mentoring in addition to first-year teacher pay and benefits, and two-thirds end up staying in education, "with the largest portion of that group as classroom teachers," says Taylor Imboden Brown, BA'08. Brown, a communication studies major, was so inspired by her own TFA experience in St. Louis that she became a manager of teacher leadership development for the program, now offering ongoing training and support to 35 corps members.
"My two years in the classroom showed me the importance of always holding myself and my students to the highest of expectations—academic and otherwise," she says. "Seeing students achieve in individual classrooms over the short term gives me hope and evidence that we can close the achievement gap in the long term."
Brown is far from alone in her beliefs—and she and Ramsey are far from alone in crediting the College of Arts and Science for aiding in their success.
TFA seeks out participants with demonstrated leadership and achievement among other attributes, and often draws highly motivated and successful students as a result. Add in the fact that, the former students say, Vanderbilt strongly encouraged them to give back through community service, think critically and strategically as part of a larger group, excel in challenging environments, interact with diverse populations, and be involved in numerous areas simultaneously, and it's no real wonder that the school is among the
top contributors of graduates to the program in the country. In 2011, Vanderbilt placed seventh among medium-sized college and university contributors, with 47 graduates headed for TFA placements last fall.
"There's no doubt that students in these underserved communities lack a lot of skills we take for granted," says Matthew Specht, BA'09, a political science major who taught math to fourth- through eighth-grade students in Kansas City. "Especially if you've gone to Vanderbilt, you've probably seen success academically. You've probably gone to good schools. For me, seeing seventh and eighth graders struggling to subtract with borrowing was humbling. But it gave me that much more motivation, recognizing that in one year, we needed to make two years' worth of progress."
Outside of the classroom, Specht says, "it's very difficult to have an appreciation for how many moving parts there are in a day of teaching, whether planning lessons or units, or just planning for 150 students who come through 25 at a time. The goal is not to have a relationship with one class, but with each of the 25 students in that class. You don't give attention to that one entity, but to building relationships with every single one, every single day."
As such, TFA teachers recount endless hours spent before and after school with students and parents, doing whatever they could to make a difference. Ramsey recalls being shocked early on when a student told him he'd seen more of Ramsey than his father in the previous three years. "I asked the class who else that was true for, and 80 percent of the hands went up," he says. "It was terrifying. They were seeing me for an hour and a half every day. Even if they had dads at home, they were working hard hours and asleep when the kids were awake."
Miron Klimkowski, BA'10, just finished his first year as a ninth-grade English teacher in Dallas. The political science major hadn't really considered a job in education, he says, but an Alternative Spring Break project opened his eyes to the possibility. He spent ASB as a teacher's assistant in a Rome, Ga., elementary school, and loved the experience. "I saw the impact that I could make in just one week. I had a couple of friends who had done Teach For America, so most of my senior year I knew I was going to do it," he says. He was fortunate, he says, to have had great teachers growing up in the Memphis public school system, teachers who instilled a pay-it-forward attitude. But nothing could really prepare him for what TFA would be.
"I had to grow up really fast," he says. "The gravity of the achievement gap becomes real to you, and you start to feel this huge sense of responsibility. Now it's my job.… But they were all such great kids. There wasn't one that I didn't like. And that impassioned me to work all the harder for them."
Although Klimkowski says it's too early to tell whether he'll keep teaching after the program is over, other TFA participants have continued in education. Specht has deferred his enrollment in law school to work at a New York City charter school. Ramsey is a teacher at KIPP Academy, a college preparatory public charter school in Nashville, and is pondering fundraising for education or possibly starting his own school. And English major Neily Todd, BA'09, says her time teaching algebra in Nashville has led to a solid commitment to continue the work she began with TFA. She, too, teaches math at KIPP Academy.
"When you're in college, so much of your day-to-day life is about you, your classes, your grades, your studies, what you want to do," she says. "That's just that phase of life. But having had this experience, working with these students, I go through my day now thinking about what's best for them, and how I can teach them things in a way that they'll understand.
"There's such a deeper sense of contentment now that my life is more than about just me, and that my actions are impacting others in a positive way," Todd says. "When I got into Teach For America, I really did believe that all students can learn. And after two years in the classroom, I know that all students can learn. It's been a cool experience to see that this is true."]]>
When Associate Professor Brandt Eichman and Assistant Professor Antonis Rokas were surprised with 2011 Chancellor's Awards for Research in August, they became the eighth and ninth biological sciences professors to receive the honor since 2005. That marks an uninterrupted seven-year run for the department's faculty.]]>
Mention Bangladesh and images of poverty, famine and environmental disaster might come to mind. That's only half the story, says Steve Goodbred, associate professor of Earth and environmental sciences.
"Bangladesh is a land of superlatives," Goodbred says. "It has big rivers draining big mountains [the Himalayas], a big climate, the world's largest river delta and lots of people. We have a lot to learn from them."
Vanderbilt and its College of Arts and Science agree. Scholars from Earth and environmental sciences, political science, sociology and religious studies have joined forces with colleagues from the School of Engineering and the Owen Graduate School of Management to study Bangladesh and its people.
Why all the interest? "Bangladesh mirrors problems the rest of the world will be facing in the next century," says Professor and Chair of Religious Studies Tony K. Stewart , who has studied the literature and religion of Bangladesh for 35 years. "They are developing innovative solutions to problems of overpopulation, poverty, rising sea levels, coastal flooding and cyclones through a creative synergy between their traditional culture and the use of modern technology."
Stewart's expertise includes several fellowships in that country, including a recent Fulbright-Hays Faculty Research Abroad Fellowship. He is also the founder and director of the Bangla Language Institute at Bangladesh's Independent University. Stewart recently joined the College of Arts and Science from North Carolina State University in a move that will increase Vanderbilt's scholarship in South Asian studies.
With a population of 162 million people—about half the size of the United States—crammed into an area roughly the size of Iowa, Bangladesh is one of the most densely populated countries in the world. Its Muslim majority has existed in relative peace and harmony with a Hindu minority for centuries. And while the country is currently stable, the potential for conflict stemming from environmental stresses exists, Goodbred says.
"Natural disasters and environmental change can cause political instability," says Goodbred, who has been studying the Ganges-Brahmaputra river delta for more than 15 years.
"Bangladesh has flooding, river migration, arsenic-contaminated groundwater, climate change, tectonic activity, earthquakes, cyclones and sea-level rise—it is a dynamic region," he notes. "We're trying to understand when, where and at what magnitude populations migrate in this area. Where's the tipping point at which large numbers of people migrate and strain other cities and countries? Can we anticipate migrations and limit potential damage through advanced preparation?"
Impressed by the interdisciplinary nature and quality of research being done at Vanderbilt, in part through the Institute for Energy and Environment, the U.S. Department of Defense recently awarded Goodbred and his team $7 million to study the impact of climate and environmental change on human migration patterns in Bangladesh. The team includes Professors David Furbish and John Ayers and Associate Professor Jonathan Gilligan, all from the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences; Associate Professor of Political Science Brooke Ackerly; Professor of Sociology Katharine Donato, and engineering colleagues George Hornberger, University Distinguished Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Earth and Environmental Science, and Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering Mark Abkowitz. The five-year grant is a multidisciplinary university research initiative with Columbia University under the Office of Naval Research.
In spring 2010, university funds allowed Goodbred, Ackerly and Gilligan to take a class of 15 graduate and undergraduate students to Bangladesh to study water resources and water-related hazards, their impact on the population and possible solutions. The Arts and Science, Engineering and Peabody students were enrolled in a transdisciplinary seminar on "Water and Social Justice in Bangladesh" [see "Active Earth" in the fall 2010 issue of Arts and Science magazine].
"Vanderbilt's investment in that course put us in a position to secure the DoD grant," Goodbred says, as well as a $1.1 million National Science Foundation award that will enable him to take classes to Bangladesh in 2012 and 2014.
The interdisciplinary culture of the College of Arts and Science helps scholars better understand the dynamics of complicated problems by bringing together teams with varied expertise, Goodbred notes. "We can engage each other to answer complex questions and our students get to sit in the middle of that process."
Political scientist Ackerly, who studies injustices associated with natural disasters, agrees: "We are teaching students from various disciplines to approach these questions informed by a broader view."
In March 2011, then-junior Haley Briel traveled to Bangladesh with Goodbred to study the Brahmaputra River. The Earth and environmental sciences major continued her research on campus this past summer, supported by the Vanderbilt Undergraduate Summer Research Program.
"Meeting the exceedingly generous and curious Bengali population gave my academic studies a new sense of enthusiasm and purpose," Briel says. "To meet literally hundreds of Bengali people, all with so little, but willing to give so much, was a truly touching experience."
That is exactly what Goodbred hopes his students will take away from their experience. "We need to educate our students and get them to foreign places to give them a different perspective," he says. "Our goal is to prepare the next generation of students to give service in the international arena."]]>
Serbia in the 1990s serves as the lens through which Assistant Professor of Art Vesna Pavlovic (pictured) contrasts normalcy and war. Her photographs were installed in a recent show at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts. The exhibit also included recent images examining modern American life.]]>
Abdiweli M. Ali, MA'88, has been named the prime minister of Somalia, the first College of Arts and Science alumnus to serve as a head of state.
Ali was appointed the acting premier of Somalia's transitional federal government in June after then-Prime Minister Mohamed A. Mohamed resigned. Soon after, Ali was named permanent prime minister and then overwhelmingly approved as prime minister by Somalia's parliament.
A Somali native, Ali came to Nashville in 1986 for Vanderbilt's esteemed Graduate Program in Economic Development. He spent two years in the College of Arts and Science, earning his master's degree in economics before returning to Somalia to serve in that country's ministry of finance and revenue.
Ali also holds a master's degree in public administration from Harvard and a doctorate in economics from George Mason University and was a fellow in Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. Most recently, he taught economics at Niagara University in Lewiston, N.Y., before returning to Somalia in late 2010 as minister of planning and international cooperation.
"I owe a lot to Vanderbilt University and it helped me at a critical juncture in my life," Ali wrote to his friends at GPED. "I am eternally grateful to all the faculty and staff members who kept me close and gave me a great opportunity to learn, grow and become the person I am today."
In one of his first policy initiatives, Ali appointed a national committee to tackle the severe drought affecting large parts of the eastern African country; approximately 11.5 million Somalis are suffering from famine. Other challenges he faces include leading a country affected by civil war, militant terrorism, piracy, religious conflicts, lawlessness and political uncertainty.]]>
Some of the chairs are newly endowed, while others are supported by gifts made previously. The gift of endowed chairs makes it possible for the university to recruit new and retain top faculty, as well as provide support for the professor's work.
The new chairholders are:
The recent Shape the Future campaign allowed the College of Arts and Science to more than triple the number of endowed chairs it had previously. Other endowed chairs are expected to be announced before the end of the school year.]]>
A great university brings the best lessons of the past and the present forward to shape the future. In this sense, a university is an inherently optimistic institution. Each fall, we welcome to our campus new students and new faculty, bright, accomplished and bristling with potential. These newcomers merge into the broad community of students and faculty here before them. They add to the living, breathing organism of thought and action that makes campus life so exhilarating.
I write today to thank you—each and every one of you—for your contributions to the vitality of this life in the Vanderbilt University College of Arts and Science. In Arts and Science we have a vision for the future that we aim to realize through our teaching and learning, our research and new discoveries, and our service to our community and to the wider world. Ours is a bold and ambitious vision that involves work at the very highest levels across and among the sciences, social sciences and humanities. I believe passionately that the diversity of thought within Arts and Science is our greatest strength. In a world that grows more complex all the time, where unimagined possibilities challenge orthodoxies of thought and belief, new answers come from unexpected sources. Complexity requires diversity.
To succeed, we need each other.
The community that advances the Arts and Science vision far exceeds the physical borders of our campus. The alumni, families and friends of Arts and Science walk alongside those of us here on campus in our principled dedication to a better future. You have expressed your dedication to that commitment thousands of times over in the past few years when we asked for your help in an effort that has, quite literally, shaped our future. Vanderbilt University has recently concluded its Shape the Future campaign. As you will learn in the pages that follow, this fundraising effort has raised money much needed in support of student scholarships, faculty research and discovery, the advancement of academic innovation and much more. The Shape the Future campaign also made clear how profoundly dedicated we—our community, in all the diversity of perspective, age and experience represented by that term—remain to a positive outlook. To a belief in education, pure and simple.
In this issue of Arts and Science, we turn the lens from its customary focus on our campus toward a vision of our larger community: toward you. You have spoken and you have acted. You have reached down deeply and given generously, even in times of economic uncertainty. Thanks to your generosity, we can point to changes for the better all over our campus—to young alumni entering the world free of debt, thanks to scholarships raised through Opportunity Vanderbilt; to advances in research vital to the arts and the sciences; to the recruitment and retention of great faculty from all over the world. I hope that in reading the pages that follow, you enjoy a glimpse of the story you have made possible. For your role in shaping a future that looks very bright indeed, it is my great honor to offer you my heartfelt gratitude.
Carolyn Dever
As a speaker of English, French, Danish and German (and who reads Swedish, Norwegian, Spanish and Italian), Virginia Scott might be forgiven for thinking it's easy to become multilingual. On the contrary: she is dedicated to increasing awareness of how people can learn other languages.
Scott, professor of French and academic director of the new Center for Second Language Studies, delves into the processes involved in learning a second language.
Her research has led her to believe that a learner's first language may play a significant role in learning a second language. That's "a bit of a heretical take," Scott says. Current teaching practice holds that exclusive use of the second language in the classroom is the only way to learn—although any teacher will tell you this approach is difficult in reality. Scott acknowledges that input and interaction in the new language are essential—but she thinks using one's native language to analyze and understand grammar structures may lead to greater proficiency.
In Scott's research, students received language problems and were asked to talk aloud in their first language about how they were solving them. Others were asked to do the same, but limited to using their second languages. Scott found that the students required to use the second language had more difficulty solving the problems.
Scott theorized that it is possible to capitalize on what people know and do with their native languages. "Language is a way of interpreting the world," she says. Her study of dynamic systems theory led her to explore the ways languages interact in the mind of one speaker-hearer. In her book, Double Talk: Deconstructing Monolingualism in Classroom Second Language Learning, she describes how this research compels rethinking current approaches to teaching and learning second languages.]]>
Philosopher—the word evokes images of ancient, dour, self-absorbed thinkers who opine esoterica that has little to do with lives of ordinary people. Contrast that with Kelly Oliver, W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy, author and media critic. The dynamic professor's classes and research dissect current events and contemporary thinking by piercing the veil of the mundane, revealing the inner workings of modern life.
"Everyone is searching for meaning in his or her life. Philosophy is a reflection on the meaning of experience," says Oliver, who examines these and other conundrums through the lens of contemporary issues. "We all wonder why are we here, what should we do and what can we hope for. To paraphrase German philosopher, Immanuel Kant, 'Philosophy rekindles our natural curiosity about life'."
Oliver's childhood laid the foundation for her philosophy career. "My family is primarily loggers and forest people from the Northwest. One of my grandfathers was a forest ranger, the other was a logger. The logger grandfather never went to high school, but he was thoughtful and reflective. He was a homegrown philosopher. He treated me like an adult and talked about the meaning of life and told amazing stories."
When she was in high school, Oliver's biology teacher was studying philosophy and would talk to her about philosophy classes where they would ask "is this chair real?" which Oliver found intriguing. "Sometimes I'd intentionally give wrong answers on tests just so I could argue with him for fun," she remembers. "I was a nascent philosopher even then."
Although her parents wanted her to study accounting and go to law school, Oliver was drawn to philosophy. After her first semester at Gonzaga University, "I knew what I wanted and I never looked back," she says. She went on to earn a master's and doctorate in philosophy at Northwestern University.
Oliver's research emerges from the study of Hegel, Nietzsche, phenomenology, Derrida, Kristeva and contemporary French philosophy. She delves deeply into the infrastructure and beliefs that drive the thinking, choices and lives of people. Whether people know it or not, Oliver says, philosophy is elemental and fundamental and at the heart of both conflict and its resolution.
"Throughout my work are common threads and questions of ethics, justice, social justice, relationships and how we relate to each other as well as the environment and animals," she explains. This encompassing perspective makes it natural for Oliver to hold a joint appointment in women's and gender studies.
Oliver has authored numerous books and articles, frequently examining modern media and culture. "Women as Weapons of War: Iraq, Sex and the Media came about as a result of the photos from Abu Ghraib Prison and the uncanniness of the photos that were released. These smiling young people looked like they should be in a high school yearbook, yet were pictured giving a thumbs up over bodies," Oliver says. "It brought me to the question 'what would lead young people to do this for fun and then photograph it?' "
Media coverage of Abu Ghraib and women on both sides of the Iraq War fascinated her because of the way the women were involved. She was likewise intrigued by women who become suicide bombers and the media attention they attract. "Women usually are portrayed as young and innocent—instead, essentially, with suicide bombing, at least as portrayed by the media, the bombshell has become the bomb."
"It struck me that women were figured as, and used as, weapons," Oliver says. "In the Guantanamo prison, there were all-women interrogation units that were used because of the humiliation it would cause the Muslim men to be tortured by women. Women were being used as military strategy."
The 2007 release netted her a spot on the ABC network's World View and international exposure. "The book was well received in Britain where Muslim culture is more apparent and politicized than in the U.S. and also well received in Iraq and Egypt," Oliver says. "It's being translated into Arabic."
Oliver is continuing to focus on issues of gender and media in Knock Me Up, Knock Me Down: Images of Pregnancy in Hollywood Film. "Hardly a month goes by without a pregnant belly on the big screen," Oliver says. "But what does it mean? While it's true there's more openness in our culture today, there's also a sexualization of pregnancy. And yet there's a conservative undertone in many of these films that suggests that having a baby will solve all of the problems in the lives of women and girls," Oliver says. The book, due out from Columbia University Press in fall 2012, explores the impact and portrayal of reproductive technology and pregnancy in Hollywood film.
To illustrate the covers of many of her books, Oliver uses the art of Spanish surrealist Remedios Varo. "Her work is melancholy, yet life affirming and full of a richness of plant, animal and human figures. There is a life force emanating from them," Oliver says. Oliver's Animal Lessons: How They Teach Us to Be Human is dedicated to her beloved cat, Kaos, and features a Varo painting of a cat on the cover, along with a poem Oliver wrote for Kaos.
"On an existential level, we are relational beings, so trying to understand who we are can only be done by [understanding] how we relate to others," Oliver says. "And what about our relations with the animals around us, those familiar and those in our environment? Some philosophers argue that we should extend rights to animals most like us. But I ask, what about animals—and people—not like us? Do you have to be like me for you to be my concern? I'd say no."
While she concedes it's easier to acknowledge obligations to friends, family and one's own culture, where to draw the line isn't that clear. "What about people whose values challenge mine?" she asks.
"Too many people think that they can exploit and kill people who challenge our values, people who are different," Oliver says. "Fundamentally, that viewpoint is why we wage war. We need to question our own values and investment in them constantly, especially our investment in violence and killing. Doing so could mean less war and more peace."
Kelly Oliver discusses Women as Weapons of War at a Thinking Out of the Lunch Box presentation in Nashville.]]>