Skip to main content

June, 2013

Professor helps validate maps of the brain’s resting state

Jun. 19, 2013—Kick back and shut your eyes. Now stop thinking. You have just put your brain into what neuroscientists call its resting state. What the brain is doing when an individual is not focused on the outside world has become the focus of considerable research in recent years. One of the potential benefits of these studies...

Read more


Engineering’s Cummings receives Prausnitz Award

Jun. 17, 2013—Peter T. Cummings, John R. Hall Professor of Chemical Engineering, has been awarded the 2013 John M. Prausnitz Award by the Conference on Properties and Phase Equilibria for Product and Process Design. The award, which was presented May 30 in Argentina at an Iryapu jungle conference center near Iguazu Falls, cites his outstanding research accomplishments...

Read more


Genetics may have played a role in student’s cancer research grant award

Jun. 14, 2013—In July, Alex Walsh will step up to a podium in Saarbrucken, Germany and deliver a talk on optical metabolic imaging at an international workshop on Advanced Multiphoton and Fluorescence Lifetime Techniques. It’s her prize for winning this year’s JenLab Young Investigator Award – one of several awards recently bestowed on the Vanderbilt Ph.D. student....

Read more


Seeds for VINES planted halfway around the world

Jun. 5, 2013—Not surprisingly, the seeds for the Vanderbilt Innovation and Entrepreneurship Society (VINES) originally were sown by a student in a classroom. What may be surprising is that founder and president Benjamin Draffin was a computer engineering sophomore and the course he was taking was more than 8,000 miles away from the Vanderbilt campus. VINES is...

Read more


Alumnus to lead new venture creation at LaunchTN

Jun. 3, 2013—Launch Tennessee (LaunchTN), a public-private partnership focused on supporting the development of high-growth businesses in Tennessee, has named Jim Stefansic as the organization’s new Commercialization Director. Stefansic, who earned a master’s and a doctorate in biomedical engineering at Vanderbilt, will be responsible for LaunchTN’s commercialization efforts and improving Tennessee’s technology-focused new venture creation. Prior to...

Read more