releases

Duke University’s Norman Wirzba, Ph.D., left, talks with Vanderbilt’s Douglas Heimburger, M.D., M.S., following Wirzba’s recent lecture on the importance of sustainable agriculture and its impact on population health.

Vanderbilt University Medical Center nephrologist and Associate Professor of Medicine Dr. William Fissell IV is making major progress on a first-of-its kind device to free kidney patients from dialysis. He is building an artificial implantable kidney with microchip filters and living kidney cells that will be powered by a patient’s own heart.

Vanderbilt engineers have modified a cotton candy machine to create complex microfluidic networks that mimic the capillary system in living tissue and have demonstrated that these networks can keep cells alive and functioning in an artificial three-dimensional matrix.

Startup veteran Robert Grajewski has been chosen as the inaugural executive director of the newly created Vanderbilt University Innovation Center.

When Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs Susan Wente emailed students early Friday morning to inform them that classes had been cancelled for the day, many of them no doubt took it as a signal to sleep in or to begin their weekends early. But for a team of dedicated staff and administrators, the work of dealing with the winter weather had just begun.

Fourteen outstanding faculty members from across the university have been named to the 2016 class of Chancellor Faculty Fellows. The class comprises highly accomplished, recently tenured faculty from the humanities, social sciences, life and physical sciences, and clinical sciences, as well as business, education and engineering.

With discoveries ranging from the origins of consciousness to the end of the universe, 2015 was a year of incredibly diverse research at Vanderbilt University.