Ten Vanderbilt University faculty members named to endowed chairs were honored Tuesday during a celebration at the Student Life Center. Their academic achievements range from imaginative scholarship on economics and development to groundbreaking discoveries about the role of DNA in memory formation.

Research on Alzheimer’s disease, hearing loss and how synaptic networks form will be featured during this year’s Brain Awareness Month in March sponsored by the Vanderbilt Brain Institute.

DNA replication is an extraordinarily complex multi-step process that makes copies of the body’s genetic blueprint. It is necessary for growth and essential to life. Now researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and Vanderbilt University have found evidence that one of those steps may involve the telephone-like transmission of electrical signals regulated by a chemical “switch.”

James Crowe Jr., M.D., director of the Vanderbilt Vaccine Center, is the 2017-2018 recipient of the Samuel Rosenthal Prize for Excellence in Academic Pediatrics.

Roderic Pettigrew, Ph.D., M.D., director of the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB) of the National Institutes of Health, will deliver the next Flexner Discovery Lecture on Thursday, March 2.

Communication and collaboration were major themes of the inaugural Research Enterprise Forum sponsored jointly by Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC) and Vanderbilt University School of Medicine (VUSM) Feb. 3 in Light Hall.