Alexander Bick, MD, PhD, a new faculty member in the Division of Genetic Medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, has received a 2020 National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director’s Early Independence Award.

Nominations for the 2021 Vanderbilt Prize in Biomedical Science are now being accepted. The nomination deadline is Dec. 11.

Until it was eclipsed by New York in mid-April, the state of Washington had the highest absolute number of COVID-19 cases in the United States.

Cody Siciliano, PhD, assistant professor of Pharmacology in the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, has been selected to receive a one-year, $100,000 research award from the Stanley Cohen Innovation Fund to support his studies of the neural substrates of memory.

The first suspected case of COVID-19 was detected in Tennessee March 5. Within four days, the lab team identified a testing platform, obtained reagents and developed and validated the test. By the end of the first 10 days, more than 3,300 tests had been completed.

Vanderbilt University Medical Center and the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill have been awarded $500,000 by Google’s philanthropy, Google.org, to study how COVID-19 alters gene expression in some people in ways that may be linked to their risk of severe illness and death.