Vanderbilt has emerged as one of the nation’s leading academic centers in neuroscience, the study of the nervous system and the brain. By exploring how the brain perceives, decides, remembers and reacts, researchers are revealing how, in the words of Vanderbilt neuroscientist René Marois, “this piece of flesh could yield such a complex thing as the mind.”

Since 2000 the university has spent more than $60 million on neuroscience facilities, programs and faculty, while the amount in neuroscience grants awarded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has nearly doubled, reaching more than $44 million last year.

Vanderbilt’s neuroscience “community” today approaches 500 faculty members, students and staff in five schools and colleges, 22 departments, and 27 centers and institutes.

The commitment to bring neuroscience from the laboratory to the clinic, the operating room, the pharmacy and the classroom “is something that’s really important,” says Dr. Jeff Balser, MD’90, PhD’90, vice chancellor for health affairs and dean of the School of Medicine. “It should be an important part of our culture to do, because it moves our science and discoveries into the hands of the public.”

Vanderbilt’s approach is to invest in people, in cutting-edge facilities and technologies, and in a collegial atmosphere that encourages collaboration across far-flung disciplines, from biology, pharmacology and engineering to education, psychology and neurosurgery.

From the undergraduate level to the most advanced research, “our university’s commitment to research and training in neuroscience requires that we bring together our remarkable faculty from across campus to tackle the challenges of interdisciplinary research on brain and behavior,” says Vanderbilt Provost Richard McCarty. “Never has our ‘one university’ philosophy been more critical in advancing discovery in laboratories and training in the classroom.”

“The physical proximity of all the schools (everything is within a 15-minute walk from end to end) … allows for effortless interactions,” says Sohee Park, the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of Psychology and professor of psychiatry, whose work has helped define the cognitive deficits of schizophrenia.

Brain Matters

Among Vanderbilt researchers exploring the complex wiring of the brain, René Marois studies the neural bases of attention and information processing. His work has helped attract more pre-eminent scientists to Vanderbilt.

Vanderbilt engineers and neurosurgeons, for example, have joined forces to develop navigation systems that can guide the scalpel during brain operations. Neurosurgeons are partnering with chemists to develop fluorescent “labels” that can pinpoint the location of cancerous cells in the brain.

Working with neurologists and psychiatrists, neurosurgeons also are studying deep brain stimulation as a treatment for Parkinson’s disease and obsessive-compulsive disorder. The technique involves inserting a thin wire deep into the brain, then applying an electrical current.

“Hubs” of collaboration include the Vanderbilt Kennedy Center, the Vanderbilt Vision Research Center, the Center for Integrative and Cognitive Neuroscience, and the Vanderbilt University Institute of Imaging Sciences.

Coordinating many of these efforts is the Vanderbilt Brain Institute (VBI). The VBI links together “the enormously diverse and interdisciplinary community that is Vanderbilt neuroscience, with the ultimate goal of fostering the highest caliber of neuroscience discovery and training,” says VBI Director Mark Wallace, who is also a professor of hearing and speech sciences and professor of psychiatry.

Established in 1999 to promote neuroscience education and training as well as research, the VBI administers the Neuroscience Graduate Program, one of the leading programs of its kind in the country. Vanderbilt also sponsors a popular interdisciplinary neuroscience program for undergraduates that encourages students to participate directly in research.

Drug Discovery

P. Jeffrey Conn is director of the new Vanderbilt Center for Neuroscience Drug Discovery, which is creating new models for drug discovery at a time when pharmaceutical companies are investing less in research.

Certainly, one of the most significant recent developments has been the establishment last year of the Vanderbilt Center for Neuroscience Drug Discovery, which supports and expands efforts to find novel treatments for brain disorders.

The center is directed by P. Jeffrey Conn, PhD’86, the Lee E. Limbird Professor of Pharmacology. Craig Lindsley, professor of pharmacology and chemistry, is the center’s director of medicinal chemistry as well as director of the Vanderbilt Specialized Chemistry Center.

Conn, Lindsley and their colleagues have developed compounds called “allosteric modulators” that can “tune” neurotransmitter receptors like dimmer switches in an electrical circuit—a departure from traditional drugs that “turn on” or “turn off” these receptors. The hope is that this more subtle approach will control symptoms better with fewer side effects.

Several compounds have shown promise in animal models of three different brain disorders.

Parkinson’s disease, a progressive disorder characterized by uncontrollable muscle tremors and rigidity, is caused by the death of dopamine-producing neurons in the brain. Dopamine replacement therapy can relieve symptoms, but over time it becomes less effective and causes debilitating side effects.

With support from NIH and the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research, Vanderbilt researchers are developing compounds that, by tuning a receptor for the neurotransmitter glutamate, may relieve the rigidity and “freezing” of certain muscles.

A second project seeks to improve treatment of schizophrenia. Current medications can reduce hallucinations and delusions, but they are less effective in relieving cognitive symptoms and social withdrawal. With funding from NIH and private industry, the researchers have identified compounds that work in two fundamentally different ways, and which they hope will alleviate all schizophrenia symptoms.

A third endeavor is raising hopes for the first drug treatment to relieve learning, memory, social and behavioral problems associated with fragile X syndrome, a genetic condition that shares features with autism.

Vanderbilt’s corporate partners are now completing animal tests of the schizophrenia and fragile X compounds required before they can be tried in humans. Early clinical trials could begin next year, Conn says.

“The combination of cutting-edge basic research in the context of an academic drug discovery program provides Vanderbilt with a tremendous capacity to both identify and treat complex brain disorders,” says Randy Blakely, the Allan D. Bass Chair in Pharmacology and a professor of psychiatry.

As they uncover the secrets that will lead to better drugs, Vanderbilt researchers are keenly aware that they stand on the shoulders of pioneering researchers. Vanderbilt neuroscience was built in part by psychopharmacologists who helped define—at the molecular level—the effects of drugs on the brain and nervous system.

They include Dr. Fridolin Sulser, professor of psychiatry and pharmacology, emeritus, who helped develop the tricyclic antidepressants; Elaine Sanders-Bush, PhD’67, professor of pharmacology, emerita, whose lab made several important discoveries about the neurotransmitter serotonin and its receptors; and Blakely, nationally known for his work on transporters, which sweep up neurotransmitters from the synaptic gap between nerve cells.

Blakely is program director of the Silvio O. Conte Neuroscience Research Center at Vanderbilt, established in 2007 with a $10 million grant from the National Institute of Mental Health, as well as the Vanderbilt Postdoctoral Training Program in Neurogenomics.

Early in his career, he discovered the genes for numerous transporters, including the serotonin transporter, target of the SSRI (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor) antidepressants such as Prozac. Since then he and his colleagues have identified transporter gene variations that contribute to autism, depression, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

Magnets in the Brain

John Gore’s 2002 arrival ushered in a new level of expertise in brain imaging for Vanderbilt. Gore brought along more than a dozen of his Yale colleagues to establish the Vanderbilt University Institute of Imaging Science.

As each area of neuroscience research grows and flourishes, it attracts top-level scientists in related fields. An example is Vanderbilt’s strength in functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI. The technique measures changes in the magnetic properties of blood as it transports oxygen to brain tissue in response to increased activity. It can thus create “pictures” of brain areas that engage in reading, language and other cognitive functions.

As postdoctoral fellows at Yale University, Isabel Gauthier and her husband, René Marois, were “early adopters” of fMRI. In 1999 they joined the Department of Psychology in Vanderbilt’s College of Arts and Science—Gauthier to explore how the brain develops face-recognition “expertise,” and Marois to pursue the neural bases of attention and information processing.

Three years later one of their Yale mentors, John C. Gore, arrived with more than a dozen colleagues to establish and direct the Vanderbilt University Institute of Imaging Science. A leader in brain imaging since the late 1970s, Gore—the University Professor of Radiology and Radiological Sciences and Hertha Ramsey Cress Chair in Medicine—was among the first to use fMRI to evaluate reading disabilities in children.

The institute has become a “magnet” for other scientists, including Stephan Heckers, the William P. and Henry B. Test Chair in Schizophrenia Research. He arrived from the famed McLean Hospital in Boston in 2006 to chair Vanderbilt School of Medicine’s Department of Psychiatry and to continue his studies of the mechanism of psychosis.

“Neuroimaging has led us to realize that the major psychiatric illnesses are associated with structural brain changes,” says Associate Professor of Psychiatry Ronald Cowan, who directs the department’s Psychiatric Neuroimaging program. “The implication of this simple message for the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness is profound.”

For researchers like Peabody College’s Bruce McCandliss, the Patricia and Rodes Hart Professor of Psychology and Human Development, access to colleagues across the campus in neuroimaging and other disciplines is crucial. McCandliss is trying to identify educational interventions that can “reshape” the brain and bolster cognitive skills such as paying attention and reading.

“Vanderbilt has state-of-the-art neuroimaging facilities and a highly collaborative community, including Peabody College, which is leading the nation in research on education and human development,” he says. “This makes Vanderbilt an ideal place to bring these two strengths together into new research on educational neuroscience.”

The brain, as is now clear, is much more than networks of nerves and bursts of chemical and electrical energy. Thanks to recent advances in genetics, neuroimaging and computer science, researchers can track the complex wiring of the brain as never before.

It will take the concerted effort of many to understand how this remarkable organ regulates body temperature and circadian rhythms, controls movement, stores memories, acquires language and—perhaps most important—makes each individual unique.

Bass guitarist and keyboardist Jay DeMarcus of Rascal Flatts poses with young fans Emma Watson (left) and Gracelyn Mansfield before a sold-out 2007 Rascal Flatts concert at Nashville’s downtown arena. With all proceeds from the show benefiting Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt, it was the largest single fundraising event ever for Children’s Hospital, netting nearly $830,000. As an infant, Gracelyn nearly died from pertussis and spent a week at Children’s Hospital under an oxygen tent.

Songwriter Harlan Howard said it best: “Country music is three chords and the truth.” Out of that simple formula has come a genre that defines the Nashville sound and its worldwide community of listeners. Where the only cure for a broken heart is to sing about it. Where tractors and trucks are the transportation of choice. Where “I should have been a cowboy” and “I’m so lonesome I could cry” are common refrains. Where family values are prized above all else.

Country music is about place (“Amarillo by Morning,” “Okie from Muskogee,” “Chattahoochee,” “Rocky Top”), and no place has loomed larger than Nashville, the site where it all began. But more than 100 years before a WSM radio announcer dubbed the town “Music City USA,” Nashville was known as the “Athens of the South,” the first Southern city to establish a public school system and the home to many colleges and universities, including Vanderbilt and its Medical Center.

Nashville was built on both entertainment and education, and today, more than ever, the industries are creating a two-part harmony with a common bass line: a love for community.

Many in country music consider Vanderbilt University Medical Center their “community hospital,” a place that offers world-class health care, whether it’s for a routine checkup or a family member’s serious illness. In return for that care, they offer their time and talents in support of the Medical Center’s mission, and they do so with a humility not always found in other genres of the entertainment industry.

“It’s such a great feeling when we visit the hospital—one of the best in the world,” says Scott Borchetta, president and CEO of Big Machine Label Group, home to artists like Taylor Swift, Reba McEntire and Garth Brooks.

Entertainer Vince Gill (in black) and producer Michael Omartian work on a song written by Children’s Hospital patient Chris Weber for a CD compilation to promote Vanderbilt’s music therapy program. Weber, who has cystic fibrosis, has written more than 10 songs and learned to play the guitar, thanks to the encouragement of music therapist Jenny Plume (right).

“One day one of us will get sick or get diagnosed, and we know Vanderbilt will be there for us,” he continues. “We feel like we can’t do enough and are honored to be part of the family.”

With more than 20 years in Nashville’s entertainment industry, Borchetta has been a longtime supporter of Vanderbilt, but his relationship intensified in 2010 when Rascal Flatts, a country supergroup with a longstanding commitment to the Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt, signed to the Big Machine record label.

Rascal Flatts has raised more than $3 million for the Children’s Hospital, hosted benefit concerts, filmed advocacy messages, performed private shows for patients and families, and offered countless hugs and photo ops.

“Seeing those kids, and being face to face with the people who you directly impact, makes all the early mornings and late flights and touring worthwhile,” says Rascal Flatts bassist Jay DeMarcus.

In November 2010, Children’s Hospital unveiled its Rascal Flatts Surgery Center, which houses existing surgical programs and will soon hold a state-of-the-art interventional radiology suite.

“It’s amazing what they do here every day. They’re able to take the most serious situations and turn them into a positive,” says Joe Don Rooney, the band’s lead guitarist and vocalist. “That’s why we knew very quickly that we wanted to be involved with Children’s Hospital. It’s a magical place.”

“This is the biggest accomplishment of our entire personal or professional careers, being a part of this hospital,” adds lead singer Gary LeVox.

Country supergroup Rascal Flatts—Gary LeVox, Joe Don Rooney and Jay DeMarcus—is honored by Vanderbilt University Medical Center on Oct. 29, 2010, with the unveiling of the Rascal Flatts Surgery Center at Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital. The band is shown with pediatric surgery staff members after performing its sixth annual Halloween concert for patients and their families. They also visited children room by room, delivering Halloween treats.

More Than a Photo Op

Dr. John W. Brock III, BA’74, Children’s Hospital surgeon-in-chief, Monroe Carell Jr. Chair, and director of the Division of Pediatric Urology, says the Rascal Flatts Surgery Center will allow the hospital to provide minimally invasive procedures that weren’t possible before.

“Rascal Flatts really is not in this for publicity,” he asserts. “They’re in it because it’s the right thing to do. I have great respect for them and think they have great respect for what we do here.”

Last Halloween, when Rascal Flatts visited the hospital, says Brock, “they didn’t leave until they went to every single room. Even though it took three times as long as they had planned, they wouldn’t leave until they had seen everyone. That’s a pretty amazing thing.”

Though Brock has forged a special relationship with the members of Rascal Flatts through the years, he sees their commitment reflected in many others in Nashville’s music industry.

“So many great people from country music have really embraced what we do. They have given their time to come here and sing and be with the children, and I’m continually amazed at the level of commitment, their soul. It’s not just a front for them,” says Brock.

Big Machine sends artists to Children’s Hospital each month to perform for patients and families.

Dr. John Brock and 5-year-old Cierrah Granito pose with Chris Henderson, left, and Brad Arnold of rock band 3 Doors Down in November 2010. The band donated a toy race car equipped with a PlayStation game system inside to Children’s Hospital.

“You always see a spirit of life in the kids. They’re so brave and tackle their illnesses so seriously,” Borchetta says. “Kids aren’t supposed to be sick. It’s a mess-up in the system, and we can’t do enough to make it right. We always walk out of the hospital asking, ‘How can we do more?’”

Rondal Richardson, entertainment industry relations manager for VUMC, says Big Machine and others in country music understand that music is a healer.

“These artists can’t cure cancer, but they can let patients know they are supported by a special community,” he says. “Music City USA has a great medical center that believes in the premise that music heals the mind, body and soul.”

Richardson has more than 25 years’ experience in the entertainment industry and helps strengthen relations between VUMC and professionals in music, athletics and performing arts. As an industry insider, he understands how precious an artist’s time is, but also how much they want to give.

“In any given week in a manager’s office in Nashville, they could get 100 requests for charity events. Learning to say no to something that is so worthy is really tough,” Richardson says.

Especially in country music, he says, artists see their fans as an extension of their families and will do just about anything to help them. “To whom much is given, much is expected, and there’s a sense that this is a beautiful family that doesn’t exist in any other form of entertainment.”

Richardson says it’s that love for family and community that draws them to Vanderbilt.

Music artist Darius Rucker discusses his performance with the ACM Lifting Lives Music Campers Chorus before their live appearance on the 46th Academy of Country Music Awards broadcast from Las Vegas last April. During the performance, viewers nationwide had the opportunity to donate to the Vanderbilt Kennedy Center, where the music camp for young people with disabilities is held each summer.

“They understand that health is one’s most important asset in life. They want to do something beyond music and give back to the people who have given them so much. Many of them really find their missions through charity work, and we’re blessed that so many of them have chosen Vanderbilt.”

Lifting Lives

Vanderbilt shone brightly in the national spotlight during the 46th Academy of Country Music Awards, broadcast last April. Hootie and the Blowfish alum and country music artist Darius Rucker took the stage with 25 young adults who have developmental disabilities to perform “Music from the Heart,” and viewers were given the opportunity to donate to the Vanderbilt Kennedy Center.

The song was a product of the ACM Lifting Lives Music Camp held each summer at the Vanderbilt Kennedy Center for people with Williams syndrome, autism and other disabilities. The song was written collectively at the camp with songwriters Brett James and Chris Young.

“The ACM Lifting Lives performance with the Kennedy Center campers was honestly one of the top musical moments of my career,” says Rucker. “Singing on stage with them, watching their faces and hearing their voices is a moment I’ll always remember.”

Lifting Lives is the Academy of Country Music’s philanthropic arm, dedicated to improving lives through the power of music, and has sponsored the Kennedy Center’s Music Camp since 2010.

The weeklong residential camp gives young adults who have developmental disabilities the opportunity to participate in songwriting workshops, recording sessions, and a live performance at the Grand Ole Opry. Country music veterans who have participated in the camp include Darius Rucker, Carrie Underwood, Gary Allan, Odie Blackmon, Mark Bright, Little Big Town and Wynonna Judd.

“Being part of the ACM Lifting Lives camp at the Vanderbilt Kennedy Center last summer was one of those inspiring moments that comes along only once in a rare while,” says Judd. “The campers lifted my spirits and restored my hope in humanity. The impact of the great work happening at the Vanderbilt Kennedy Center around the idea of ‘music as a healer’ is something I am proud to celebrate. It is indeed proof that when we stand together, it is our finest hour.”

The Pied Piper

for Children’s Hospital

Jeff Balser, Vanderbilt vice chancellor for health affairs, presents entertainer Kix Brooks with a plate decorated by a Children’s Hospital patient as a token of appreciation for his support through the years. Brooks, who serves on the hospital’s board of directors, is credited with fueling much of today’s interest in the Children’s Hospital by Nashville’s music community.

“It all comes back to the hope in a child’s eyes, knowing they are counting on us to help them get well. It is a giant responsibility, and one we have to embrace. I can’t think of anything more important.”

—Kix Brooks

Much of today’s support for the Children’s Hospital can be traced back to one man: Kix Brooks, half of country superstar duo Brooks & Dunn.

“He was the first to get down on the floor with the kids, and then he told all his peers,” says Rondal Richardson. “He was the Pied Piper for that place. Everyone followed him in, and thankfully no one has wanted to leave.”

Back in the early ’90s, when Brooks & Dunn was headlining its first concert at Nashville’s Starwood Amphitheater, two industry veterans—song publisher Donna Hilley and Connie Bradley from the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP)—contacted Brooks and requested he donate all the concert proceeds to the Children’s Hospital.

Brooks admits he was flabbergasted. Like many, he had bought into the false notion of the “Magnolia Curtain” cutting off Vanderbilt from the wider Nashville community.

“Like many people with no knowledge of the place, when you hear the word ‘Vanderbilt,’ you generally assume here’s a place with plenty of money that serves those in Nashville who can afford it, and a place that certainly wouldn’t be needing a donation from somebody like me,” recalls Brooks.

But Hilley and Bradley encouraged him to visit the hospital, then housed on three cramped floors in Vanderbilt University Hospital.

What he found, Brooks says, “was a hospital that was extremely overcrowded and, quite frankly, threadbare—with a dream in the air of a new facility that had been promised for the near future, and a staff of doctors and nurses who were working in very tough conditions with an attitude that made me embarrassed I would ever complain about anything. They were putting smiles on the faces of some very sick kids and putting hope in the hearts of their parents.”

Vanderbilt Children’s Hospital, Brooks soon realized, “was not the pretentious, exclusive establishment I had conjured up in my mind, but a nonprofit hospital, made for the everyday families of not just Tennessee but all the bordering states and beyond—and no child was being turned away because they couldn’t pay.”

For Brooks, it was a moment of revelation: “Wow, I thought. I’ve got to do my part. This isn’t their hospital—this is our hospital.”

Country music artists Wynonna Judd and Dierks Bentley, BA’97, prepare to lead the fourth annual Dierks Bentley Miles and Music for Kids motorcycle run and concert benefiting Children’s Hospital. Each year the ride from Franklin, Tenn., to Nashville ends with a downtown concert at Riverfront Park featuring Bentley and his friends.

All the proceeds from that sellout concert were given to the hospital, and shortly afterward, Brooks joined the hospital’s board of directors, on which he still serves today.

“I am very proud of the progress we’ve made between Music Row and the hospital, but we have to keep growing this mission,” he says. “Honestly, it all comes back to the hope in a child’s eyes, knowing they are counting on us to help them get well. It is a giant responsibility, and one we have to embrace. I can’t think of anything more important, and with all sincerity, I feel privileged for the opportunity.”

In addition to Rascal Flatts, one of Brooks’ early followers was Dierks Bentley, BA’97, whose annual Miles and Music for Kids celebrity motorcycle ride and concert is one of Children’s Hospital’s more visible entertainment events. Now being duplicated in other cities, it has attracted 36,000 fans and raised more than $2 million for Children’s Miracle Network hospitals.

“God Picked Guatemala for Me”

Children’s Hospital supporter Steve Moore leads the Country Music Association.

“Country music artists are giving people with big hearts, so it doesn’t surprise me a bit that so many support Vanderbilt and the Children’s Hospital.”

—Steve Moore, CEO, Country Music Association

Brooks also connected with Steve Moore, CEO of the Country Music Association (CMA), the genre’s trade organization. He is personally committed to Children’s Hospital through the Shalom Foundation, a charitable organization he founded to serve children and families living in extreme poverty, with a special focus on Guatemala.

“God picked Guatemala for me,” Moore declares. “I went there on a construction trip through my church to build a school. Then when I saw the Children’s Hospital for the first time and walked through it, it ached me that kids in Guatemala would never see a facility like that.”

After meeting Dr. John Brock, the two forged a relationship to send surgical teams to Guatemala, a project that grew to demand a permanent surgical facility there. Earlier this year a Vanderbilt team helped open the Moore Pediatric Surgery Center, a 2,000-square-foot structure equipped for medical and surgical care with three operating rooms and beds for pre-operation, intensive care and recovery.

“The staff at Vanderbilt was instrumental in consulting on the needs and specifications and even giving some financial assistance to getting the facility open. Great nurses and doctors have gone on our trips, and Vanderbilt is a great partner for Shalom,” says Moore.

“We really have a chance to live out part of Chancellor Zeppos’ vision for ‘one Vanderbilt’” through the endeavors in Guatemala, Brock points out. “Guatemala is a natural fit because we’re so involved with Vanderbilt’s Center for Latin American Studies and with medical care. How we marry those two together gives us a true ‘one Vanderbilt’ presence, and we couldn’t have done some of that without Steve.”

Now Moore is encouraging all CMA members to lend their support to Vanderbilt.

“Country music artists are giving people with big hearts, so it doesn’t surprise me a bit that so many of them support Vanderbilt and the Children’s Hospital,” Moore says. “I would, of course, like to see more get involved, though.

“In doing so, you get more than you’re giving, and the reward is beyond measure, especially when you’re working with children. Artists know they have been really blessed with talent and resources in their career, and they look to do something meaningful and give back.”

Leslie Hill is an information officer for Vanderbilt University Medical Center News and Communications.

For one group of Vanderbilt undergrads, the Systems Biology and Bioengineering Undergraduate Research Experience (SyBBURE) Searle Undergraduate Research Initiative helps bridge that gap. 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 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 and Cambridge, as well as Vanderbilt.

SyBBURE Searle participants explore science at the intersection of systems biology and bioengineering. To date, about 110 students have participated in the program, which owes its existence to the financial support of D. Gideon Searle, BS’75.

SyBBURE Searle Director Kevin Seale, left, and junior Jake Brady work in the VUMC Division of Trauma on biological microelectromechanical systems (BioMEMS) for studying leukocytes from trauma patients using a computer-controlled and automated Nikon microscope funded last year by Gideon Searle.

In 2006, Searle made a commitment to fund the Searle Undergraduate Research Initiative within the Vanderbilt Institute for Integrative Biosystems Research and Education. The aim of the initiative was to provide undergraduate students with mentored experiences in advanced scientific investigation with some of the university’s leading research and teaching faculty. D. Gideon Searle is the great-great-grandson of G.D. Searle, founder of the pharmaceutical giant that bore his name (the company is now part of Pfizer Inc.). Gideon Paul Searle, the son of D. Gideon Searle, is also a Vanderbilt graduate, having earned his bachelor’s degree in 2007.

While SyBBURE Searle is open to any Vanderbilt undergraduate, most participants are nascent scientists and researchers who crave more focused educational experience. Most are selected by Kevin Seale, MS’97, PhD’00, SyBBURE Searle’s director, and John Wikswo, who directs the Vanderbilt Institute for Integrative Biosystems Research and Education.

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, explains Wikswo, the Gordon A. Cain University Professor, A.B. Learned Professor of Living State Physics, and professor of biomedical engineering, molecular physiology and biophysics, and physics.

“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? SyBBURE Searle is a place where it’s totally acceptable to be ignorant. There are no stupid questions.”

For Peter DelNero, BE’11, who majored in chemical and biomolecular engineering, SyBBURE Searle’s appeal was its interdisciplinary platform. “Through my peers and advisers in SyBBURE,” he says, “I had access to a broad knowledge base with which to approach new problems in bioengineering.”

Peter DelNero, BE’11, prepares samples in a cell culture hood at Cornell University. While a SyBBURE Searle researcher, he helped establish a collaboration with École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland using microfabricated devices for studying cell migration in three dimensions.

Via SyBBURE Searle, DelNero completed an internship in Switzerland, where his passion for cancer research was born. Now a doctoral candidate in biomedical engineering at Cornell University, DelNero’s work focuses on tissue engineering of cancer tumors.

Describing SyBBURE Searle as “the single most influential element of my undergraduate education,” DelNero says, “My interaction with pre-eminent SyBBURE faculty in biology, engineering and medicine formed my decision to pursue a Ph.D. at Cornell.”

Jake Hughey, BE’07, a biomedical engineering and mathematics major, puts it succinctly: “I wouldn’t be at Stanford if not for SyBBURE,” says Hughey, who is now a doctoral candidate in bioengineering. “It profoundly shaped me as a scientist.”

Pieces and Puzzles

While most SyBBURE Searle participants are high achievers like DelNero and Hughey, selection for the experience isn’t based on GPA or transcripts alone, explains Kevin 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 junior 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.”

Katherine Roth, a junior, sits at an automated Zeiss microscope used by SyBBURE Searle students with Professor John Wikswo. Wikswo had advised Katherine’s father, Brad Roth, at Vanderbilt during his Ph.D. research. Katherine’s mother, Shirley Oyog Roth, MS’86, also studied physics at Vanderbilt.

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, and as a Vanderbilt student, John Wikswo was his dissertation adviser.

Now Katherine 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.”

Students like Roth receive a stipend while in SyBBURE Searle’s labs. “They become credible instantly,” says Seale. “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.”

Parker Gould, BE’11, says SyBBURE Searle was seminal to his graduate studies at the University of Cambridge, particularly in helping to foster tenacity. “There were times in my research when ‘success’ meant failing less often or when a ‘good’ yield was one out of two,” says Gould, who majored in electrical engineering and political science at Vanderbilt. He joined SyBBURE Searle as a second-semester freshman and worked on a rotary planar peristaltic micropump (RPPM).

“The work started with a meeting that was supposed to be about fixing a flaw in another pump. Two days and eight hours later, we had the design for the RPPM hashed out,” Gould says. Two weeks later a working prototype had been completed. Ninety days later a provisional patent application was ready. Within 15 months the full patent application had been completed and a journal article about it submitted, he says.

For Seale, the payoff is found 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.”

Find out more: sybbure.org

First, we seek nominations for the Distinguished Alumni Award. This is the highest award bestowed by the association, and is given only when a worthy candidate emerges who demonstrates exceptional lifetime achievement in the service of mankind. Should a suitable nominee be identified, this award will be announced and presented in conjunction with Reunion/Homecoming 2012.

The second and third nomination processes relate to the volunteer leadership of your Alumni Association.

Under our new bylaws, adopted in 2009, members of the Alumni Association Board of Directors hold office for three years, and we recruit one-third of the board each year. With the election of our third class of seven new directors in the spring, the restructuring of the board will be complete, and the new directors will take office July 1. We seek your nominations for these seven leadership positions.

Finally, the presidency of the Alumni Association rotates every two years. Carroll Kimball, our current president-elect, will take over as president July 1, and we will choose a new president-elect in parallel with the election of new board directors. We therefore seek your nominations for the post of president-elect.

Elsewhere in this section you will find details about the criteria and process for making nominations. Please help us identify and recognize those among our number who best qualify for these important offices and awards.

John Hindle, BA’68, PhD’81
President, Vanderbilt Alumni Association
john.hindle@vanderbilt.edu

Remember that the Alumni Association is a great source for career help. You can look to us for job postings, career development workshops and online resources, networking opportunities through Vanderbilt Chapter events and the VUconnect online community, exclusive Vanderbilt discounts and more. Contact Kate Stuart, assistant director for alumni career services, for more information at (615) 343-7890 or kate.stuart@vanderbilt.edu.

The Office of Alumni Relations supports these groups by helping them find other interested alumni and by providing Web and social media tools. Current groups include the Association of Vanderbilt Black Alumni, Navy ROTC, Asian American Alumni Association, baseball alumni, Army ROTC and LGBTQI.

If you are interested in joining or forming a new shared interest group, contact Chris Griffin, special interest liaison, at (615) 322-4405 or chris.griffin@vanderbilt.edu. You also may go to vanderbilt.edu/alumni/shared-interest.

Helen Hudson

Helen Hudson, MEd’94, has enjoyed a varied career: high school English teacher, songwriter, recording artist, actress, therapist, speaker and author. Her memoir, Kissing Tomatoes, which details the 13 years she and her husband cared for her grandmother with Alzheimer’s disease, was profiled recently in Counseling Today, and she speaks around the country about the importance of caring for the elderly with compassion. Hudson is completing work on her new CD, Whistle in the Dark, which soon will be available on iTunes. She lives in Nashville with her husband and two teenage daughters. Learn more at helen-hudson.com.

Allena Berry

Allena Berry is a senior at Peabody College, majoring in human and organizational development and history. Although the Blair School of Music first attracted her to Vanderbilt, she says, “in the end, Peabody captured my heart.” A native of Racine, Wis., she has been a frequent contributor to the Vanderbilt Hustler and Inside Vandy and is also a VUceptor. Last year she spent a semester as an intern for the Washington, D.C., public school system.

Rob Simbeck

Rob Simbeck’s work has appeared in The Washington Post, Guideposts, Country Weekly, Field & Stream, Free Inquiry and many other publications. He has won three national awards for his work in the Nashville Scene and two international awards for his outdoor writing. Learn more at robsimbeck.com.

Mardy Fones

Mardy Fones has been a writer and editor for more than 35 years and has worked at newspapers, in university public relations, and in publications management for a Fortune 500 company. Currently a freelancer, her clients range from USAA to New York Stock Exchange Magazine. A graduate of the University of Missouri School of Journalism, she focuses on people-driven stories reflecting their subjects’ passions and aspirations. When not writing, she works to support adoption of retired racing greyhounds as pets.

Joanne Beckham

Joanne Lamphere Beckham, BA’62, worked as an award-winning editor at Vanderbilt more than 25 years. Since retiring from a full-time career in 2006, she has continued writing for various publications and has taught in an ESL (English as a second language) program. At Vanderbilt she earned her undergraduate degree in English, cum laude, and did graduate work at Peabody College and the Owen Graduate School of Management.

COVER: Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital patient Ansley McLaurin gets a backstage tour of the Grand Ole Opry House from Rascal Flatts members Jay DeMarcus, Joe Don Rooney and Gary LeVox. Rascal Flatts, who recently became the newest members of the Opry, personifies the growing trend of Nashville entertainers who share their time and talents with Vanderbilt University Medical Center. Ansley has been treated successfully for a primary lung tumor. For more about Vanderbilt’s partnership with the music industry, read "Honky-Tonk Heroes and Healing Hands" in this issue. Photo by John Russell.

• Editor
  GayNelle Doll
• Art Director and Designer
  Donna DeVore Pritchett

Editorial

• Associate Editor and Production Manager
  Phillip B. Tucker
• Arts & Culture Editor
  Bonnie Arant Ertelt, BS’81
• Class Notes and Sports Editor
  Nelson Bryan, BA’73

Photography and Imaging

• Director, Photography Services
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Vanderbilt Magazine is published three times per year by Vanderbilt University from editorial and business offices at 2525 West End Ave., Suite 700, Nashville, TN 37203. Phone: (615) 322-1003. Web version: www.vanderbilt.edu/vanderbiltmagazine. Email: vanderbiltmagazine@vanderbilt.edu. Please send address corrections to Gift Processing Office, Vanderbilt University, PMB 407727, 2301 Vanderbilt Place, Nashville, TN 37240-7727. Vanderbilt Magazine is printed on recycled paper by Lane Press in Burlington, Vt.

Opinions expressed in Vanderbilt Magazine are those of the individual authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the magazine or the university administration.

Vanderbilt University is committed to the principles of equal opportunity and affirmative action.

Copyright 2012 Vanderbilt University

Faculty and staff of Vanderbilt School of Medicine are conducting workshops for military health care providers—funded by the U.S. Army Medical Research and Acquisition Activity—with a goal of improving those providers’ communication with service members so any mental health concerns can be identified earlier and subsequent referrals can be made to address those needs.

Susan Douglas Kelley and Leonard Bickman of Vanderbilt Peabody College received a three-year grant to develop a training program for military and civilian health care providers who screen returning service members for deployment-related health problems. They also targeted a specific point of time for the study: during the Post-Deployment Health Reassessment, or PDHRA, which service members complete 90 to 180 days after returning to the U.S.

The first step is a comprehensive questionnaire, typically completed online, followed by a one-on-one interview with a health care provider by phone, videoconference or in person to review the responses and make referrals when warranted.

Vanderbilt experts are using “standardized patients”—actors trained to simulate real patients—to help train military health care providers to identify mental health concerns among returning U.S. service personnel. The simulation is conducted via live video streaming from Vanderbilt’s Center for Experiential Learning and Assessment.

“It’s such an important time in the deployment cycle to assess mental health needs,” says Kelley, senior research associate, deputy director of Peabody’s Center for Evaluation and Program Improvement, and the study’s co-primary investigator.

“There are so many competing demands when service members first get home. Three to six months later, they’ve had time to experience many issues that are going to come up as they reintegrate into their lives, and they also might be anticipating a next deployment.”

Kelley collaborated with Vanderbilt School of Medicine’s Lynn Webb, who helps Vanderbilt physicians improve communication with patients and staff, to create a workshop that teaches military providers patient-centered communication skills—techniques used to build patient trust and compliance. They have conducted training exercises with providers at three military treatment facilities to teach these skills. The workshops emphasize active discussion and hands-on practice to enhance participant engagement and skill-building.

Webb recognized significant differences between a traditional physician–patient encounter and the PDHRA interview, which is typically 15 minutes or less in length.

“With the average interview so short, relationship-building with the patient becomes even more important. You have to do very specific things in a brief interview to enhance the chance that the soldier will feel comfortable divulging something that he or she probably doesn’t want to divulge in the first place,” says Webb, assistant dean for faculty development and assistant professor of medical education and administration.

Kelley, MS’93, PhD’99, and Bickman are leading the evaluation team conducting research on the feasibility and efficacy of the workshop in enhancing soldier disclosure and compliance with referrals. Results will be reported to U.S. Army Medical Research and Acquisition Activity in the fall of 2012.

This study builds on a previous DoD-funded evaluation of the PDHRA process completed in 2009 by Kelley and Bickman. Bickman is director of Peabody’s Center for Evaluation and Program Improvement, Betts Chair, and professor of psychology and human development, human and organizational development, and psychiatry.

The committee—chaired by Vanderbilt’s Dr. Ellen Wright Clayton, the Craig–Weaver Chair in Pediatrics, professor of law, and director of the Center for Biomedical Ethics and Society—looked at scientific evidence regarding potential risks of vaccines covered by the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program.

The analysis spanned more than 1,000 research articles and concluded that few health problems are caused by or clearly associated with vaccines. That conclusion was of such intense public interest that Clayton did a remarkable 54 media interviews the day of its release.

“The findings should be reassuring to parents that few health problems are clearly connected to immunizations, and these effects occur relatively rarely,” she says. “And repeated study has made clear that some health problems are not caused by vaccines.”

The report, “Adverse Effects of Vaccines: Evidence and Causality,” was not intended, as noted by committee members, to answer the question, “Are vaccines safe?” And where the committee did find evidence of a possible causal relationship, it did not make conclusions about the rate or incidence of these adverse events. For most analyses in the report, the evidence is inadequate to accept or reject a causal relationship, committee members said.

An Institute of Medicine committee chaired by Dr. Ellen Wright Clayton concludes that few health problems are caused by vaccines.

Vaccines studied included the varicella zoster vaccine; influenza vaccines; hepatitis B vaccine; human papillomavirus vaccine (HPV); tetanus toxoid-containing vaccines other than those containing the whole-cell pertussis component; measles, mumps and rubella vaccines; hepatitis A vaccine; and meningococcal vaccines.

Evidence showed no links between immunization and serious conditions that have raised concerns, including Type 1 diabetes and autism.

Committee members found convincing evidence of 14 health outcomes—including seizures, inflammation of the brain and fainting—that can be caused by certain vaccines, although these outcomes occur rarely. They also reported indicative, though less clear, data on associations between specific vaccines and four other effects, including allergic reactions and temporary joint pain.

Establishing a cause-and-effect relationship between an agent and a health outcome requires solid evidence, committee members said. In many cases of suggested vaccine-related adverse outcomes, too little evidence exists—or the available evidence offers conflicting results or is otherwise inadequate to draw conclusions.

The review, sponsored by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), will be used to help administer the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program.

Here it is: If the real disposable incomes of voters are growing—even modestly—in the six months before Election Day, Obama is likely to win. If they aren’t, he is likely to lose. So says Larry Bartels, the May Werthan Shayne Professor of Public Policy and Social Science and professor of political science.

Among the many economic indicators featured in the news, this one (which includes income from wages, investments, tax cuts and government benefits) is the most reliable predictor of an incumbent’s fortunes. More familiar indicators like unemployment and gross domestic product growth seem to matter much less, probably because they are less closely tied to the average voter’s sense of economic
well-being.

Voters often do a poor job of per- ceiving why economic conditions improve or deteriorate, says Vanderbilt political scientist Larry Bartels.

According to Bartels, who has researched voter trends for more than three decades, election-year income growth is more important than campaign-specific factors like who the opposition party nominates. It is also more important than economic performance over the incumbent’s entire term. Thus, even though the economy has been faltering for much of Obama’s
presidency, he could be propelled to victory by an upturn in real incomes in the months leading up to the election.

“Voters tend to have very short memories,” says Bartels, who co-directs the Vanderbilt Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions. So if things are looking better this year, “that’s going to be a huge plus for Obama despite the fact that people have felt a lot of pain up until this point.”

Bartels has done extensive research on the impact of economic conditions on voting behavior, and his work is cited frequently in the national press. His 2008 book, Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age (Princeton University Press), was cited by Obama during his first presidential campaign and was named in The New York Times as one of the “economics books of the year.”

Both political parties are well aware of the dynamic Bartels describes. Obama will try to stimulate the economy to give himself an economic boost at the proper time to help him get re-elected. Republicans will try to thwart any such effort.

“I think that does cause problems in governing,” he says, “but I wouldn’t say in a general sense that it means democracy doesn’t work. Because if you say that, then you have to ask, ‘In comparison to what?’”

This is the best article [“Missteps to Mayhem,” Summer 2011] I have read concerning our current financial situation and the hard choices that must be made. Human nature ignores the truth when it involves hard decisions and sacrifice, but Dr. Burry eloquently argues that we must heed the call.
James P. Schuengel, BA’80
Louisville, Ky.

Terrific article. I’ve bookmarked it under “Best Posts about the GFC [Global Financial Crisis]” and am forwarding it to everybody I think will pay attention (a short list, sad to say). Michael Burry’s sentiment—“I worry about the future of a nation that would refuse to acknowledge the true causes of the crisis”—causes me despair because it’s true. Our future is bleak unless there is some miracle. And I don’t believe in miracles.
Clark Thornton, JD’95
Old Hickory, Tenn.

I Survived Kissam Hall

I wonder how many “survivors” of the original Kissam Hall [The Campus, “College Halls Moves to Kissam,” Summer 2011] are left besides me. I lived there in the academic year 1945–46.
Donald Kraft, BA’49, MA’49
Northbrook, Ill.

Editor’s Note: Learn much more about Kissam’s history here. We invite readers to post their recollections of Kissam at the end of the article.

Our Brothers’ Keeper

Andrew, I am so touched by your words [S.P.O.V., “A Vineyard Not My Own,” Summer 2011]. Thank you for reminding us who we are, where we came from, and where we are going. What an eye-opening article. Keep on keeping on, brother.
Lea Ann Kellum
Crockett, Texas

Pathfinders in Biology

Terrific article [Collective Memory, Summer 2011], Dr. Collins—thank you! I worked in Buttrick Hall myself as a grad student in the late 1960s/early ’70s, but had no idea such seminal research in molecular biology had taken place in the building.
Peter Oates, PhD’75
Gales Ferry, Conn.

Editor’s Note: We ran an outdated and inaccurate biographical sketch of author Dr. Robert Collins in the Summer 2011 issue. Vanderbilt Magazine regrets the error and apologizes for any confusion it may have caused. To set the record straight, below we are printing the correct biography Dr. Collins had provided to us:

Dr. Robert Collins, BA’48, MD’51, has been on the Vanderbilt faculty since 1957. Teaching medical students how to solve problems was his focus for 40 years, during which time he and his wife, Elizabeth Cate Collins, BA’50, welcomed generations of students and faculty into their home. His second career, begun in 1999, currently encompasses writing, collaborative research and teaching residents microscopy. He has written four books: two in his field of hematopathology, the third a biography of Vanderbilt scientist Ernest Goodpasture, and the fourth titled Ahmic Lake Connections, The Founding Leadership of Vanderbilt University.

Vanderbilt Magazine's first cover after the last redesign in 2002.

This issue of Vanderbilt Magazine represents the last of its kind—but by no means signals the end of Vanderbilt’s flagship publication. This year we are rethinking and redesigning the magazine, an undertaking I find both thrilling and humbling.

The current incarnation of Vanderbilt Magazine made its debut in 2002, and in terms of reader response has been a resounding success. So why are we reinventing the wheel?

Part of the answer is pretty obvious. Think how communications have proliferated during the past decade. Now, depending on your relationship with the university and your preferences, you may receive news not only through the magazine but also through email, e-newsletters, VUconnect, VUCast newscasts, Facebook, Twitter, and other ways, regardless of whether you live in Nashville or Nairobi.

Our research and your feedback tell us that a print magazine remains a vital means of communication—in some ways more than ever. Having so many tools at our fingertips not only has helped to diffuse communication—but to distill it as well.

So the question we are asking as we undertake this redesign becomes: What is the essence of Vanderbilt?

As we embark on our magazine redesign, we are carefully thinking about what defines Vanderbilt as a community. As someone who has met thousands of alumni, students and faculty members during the past quarter-century, I would put these characteristics at the top of my list: civility, curiosity, inspired ambition, humor, generosity, and vision for a better world.

The focus on campus these days is less on Vanderbilt’s individual colleges and schools, and more on the university as a whole. The lines between the “university side” of Vanderbilt and the “medical center side” have blurred as the benefits of cross-disciplinary study and resource sharing become clear. You will see this “one Vanderbilt” philosophy reflected in the new magazine, too.

What won’t change is our commitment to presenting an array of voices from the Vanderbilt community, bringing the university to life from the points of view of students, faculty members—and especially alumni.

As we work through the process of reinventing Vanderbilt Magazine, we will continue to communicate with our readers electronically to update you on our plans. Expect to see the new Vanderbilt Magazine about the time students return to campus this fall.

I’d like to hear your thoughts on what you’d like to see in the new magazine. Email me at gaynelle.doll@vanderbilt.edu, or call me at (615) 322-1003.

Members of the Class of 2012 mug for the camera during Seniorfest, an event held in September that helped raise awareness of the value of giving back.

Student Class Fund officers Paige Cobbs, Kate Goudge, Tessa McLain, Sloane Speakman and Matthew Taylor have led the effort, with a goal of achieving 40 percent class participation. They are encouraging their fellow classmates to give $20.12 to the class gift—and designate those individual gifts to a part of the university that has had meaning for them.

Senior Class Fund activities co-chair Kate Goudge is majoring in human and organizational development, with a minor in corporate strategy. Her Senior Class Fund gift, she says, will go to the Reformed University Fellowship (RUF) ministry team and to support study abroad. “I’ve made many friends at RUF, and it’s impacted my time here,” she says. “And my study abroad was one of my most challenging and rewarding experiences.”

Throughout its last year at Vanderbilt, the Class of 2012 has enjoyed a number of events aimed at drawing attention to the Senior Class Fund effort, including a weeklong celebration, a thank-you reception hosted by Chancellor Nicholas S. Zeppos, and more.

To make it easy to give and to help bring awareness to the need for support, including the fact that Vanderbilt tuition pays only about 70 percent of the cost of an undergraduate education—meaning that alumni, parents and friends must make up the difference with their gifts—they have helped put together a website that includes a countdown to graduation, a video and more.

Find out more: vanderbilt.edu/seniorclassfund/2012

Irène Mathieu received a Canby Robinson Society scholarship.

As a Fulbright scholar in the Dominican Republic, Irène Mathieu developed a passion for global health. But she knew attending medical school would likely leave her with substantial debt.

A native of Virginia and graduate of The College of William & Mary, Mathieu visited several medical schools but found the community environment she was looking for at Vanderbilt. “It was my top choice—not only were faculty and students welcoming when I visited, but they followed up with me throughout the application process,” she says.

She was thrilled when she received an acceptance call, but she needed to wait on financial aid offers to determine which school she would attend. Several weeks later Dr. George Hill contacted Mathieu with the news that she had been selected as a full scholarship recipient. “The scholarship made my decision to come here a no-brainer,” says Mathieu. In the future she hopes to research primary care and noncommunicable diseases in middle-income countries.

The Scholarship Initiative for Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, launched in fall 2011, extends opportunity to students who seek to make a difference in medicine. A larger scholarship endowment will allow students like Mathieu to choose Vanderbilt regardless of financial circumstances. Too often, awards from institutions with larger endowments attract talented students, even if they would rather attend Vanderbilt. The Class of 2011 left campus last year with an average debt of $135,800.

“While our tuition is highly competitive with our peer schools, the debt facing most of our graduates is far too steep,” says Dr. Jeff Balser, MD’90, PhD’90, dean of the School of Medicine and vice chancellor for health affairs. “As a recipient of a Vanderbilt medical scholarship myself, I know firsthand the value of these scholarships.”

Dr. W. Bedford Waters celebrates with his mother, Irene Georgia Bedford Waters, on her 90th birthday.

Dr. W. Bedford Waters, BA’70, MD’74, established the Irene Georgia Bedford Waters Scholarship in the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine to honor his mother, whose compassion and encouragement brightened the world around her.

Irene Waters had the same expectation for her son that she had for herself: “Do your best.” His diligence in meeting her expectation earned him a John D. Rockefeller Scholarship at Vanderbilt.

When medical school tuition presented a barrier to becoming a doctor, an anonymous donor stepped forward. All the donor asked was, “Do your best.”

As the second African American graduate of Vanderbilt’s School of Medicine, Waters led the way for others. He went on to become chief resident in urology at The Harvard Program in Urology (Longwood Area) and to serve on the faculties of the University of Illinois and the Stritch School of Medicine at Loyola University Chicago.

Waters has transformed many lives as a physician, leader, teacher, mentor and friend. He is currently professor of surgery in the Division of Urology and Urologic Oncology at the University of Tennessee Graduate School of Medicine.

At Vanderbilt he was elected to the Alumni Association Board of Directors in 1986. He now rallies alumni support for scholarships as a member of the Vanderbilt Medical Alumni Association Board and leader of the Knoxville Vanderbilt Chapter.

Third-year medical student Arter Biggs II is the first recipient of the Irene Waters Scholarship.

Santisteban in his Franklin, Tenn., studio

Jose Santisteban—beads of perspiration glistening on his brow—rotates a long, thin metal tube tipped with a bubble of honey-colored molten glass inside a furnace that’s been heated to 2,100 degrees Fahrenheit. As African jazz plays in the background, Santisteban removes the pipe from the furnace, blows air into the glass bubble, and gently rolls it into a desired shape on a metal table. He repeats the process over and over, using various metal and wooden tools to shape the bubble into a beautiful glass vase.

“I’m fascinated by so many things about glass,” he says. “It’s a mysterious medium. I love its fluidity, how it moves and behaves. I love everything about it.”

Owner of the Franklin Glassblowing Studio, Santisteban, BA’99, came to his love of glassblowing after college, having taken only one art course—an elective in painting—as an undergraduate English major. “I didn’t want to go to graduate school in English or philosophy,” he says, “so a month after graduation, I went to Seattle and became apprenticed to a family friend who owned a glassblowing studio there.”

I’m fascinated by so many things about glass. It’s a mysterious medium. I love its fluidity, how it moves and behaves. I love everything about it.

—Jose Santisteban, BA’99

It was in Seattle that Santisteban met famed glassblowers like Dale Chihuly and realized that making art from glass was his life’s calling. He went on to earn a master’s degree in fine arts from Rochester Polytechnic Institute in New York, then studied with master Venetian glassblowers Silvano Signoretto and Davide Salvadore in Murano, Italy.

Returning to Middle Tennessee, Santisteban spent two years planning and building a modern glassblowing studio in a renovated office building in Franklin, just south of Nashville. “Modern” is a misnomer, as the glassblowing process has changed very little since the Phoenicians invented it in the first century B.C. Today’s furnaces may be heated by gas or electricity instead of wood, and a stainless steel table has replaced the marble slab where the blown glass is turned and shaped. But the media and equipment—shards of clear and colored glass; metal blowpipes, tweezers and cutters; wooden shaping blocks; even wet paper—are very similar to the ancient tools of the trade.

Prices for Santisteban’s work range from $65 for a paperweight to $400 for a small vase and several thousand dollars for a chandelier. He also offers instruction in glassblowing for beginners and advanced students.

Find out more: snipurl.com/glassblowing

Wilson, whose 2009 short-story collection, Tunneling to the Center of the Earth, received more critical praise than commercial success, lives quietly with his wife, poet Leigh Anne Couch, and their 3-year-old son in Sewanee, Tenn. He admits to finding all the attention disruptive and overwhelming at times, but is nevertheless grateful for it. “You want your book to be received in the larger world,” he says.

Fiction writer Kevin Wilson and his wife, poet Leigh Anne Couch

Wilson grew up in tiny Winchester, Tenn., the son of an insurance salesman and a homemaker who, he says, “loved imagination” and encouraged their children to indulge their creativity. “My parents put a lot of stock in narrative and stories, so we were constantly making stuff up,” he recalls. He arrived at Vanderbilt with a love of books but no plans to be a writer. That soon changed.

“My sophomore year, I took a fiction writing workshop with Tony Earley,” he says. “The minute I met him and the minute I started writing my own stuff, I knew what I wanted to do.”

He went on to earn an M.F.A. degree in creative writing at the University of Florida and joined the staff of the Sewanee Writers’ Conference in 2005. Though the job was demanding, he says it “kept me connected to the work. It was good to be around people devoted to writing.” Wilson left the conference this year to assume a full-time faculty position at the University of the South.

Wilson’s second novel is still in the incubation stage, but is likely to explore some of the same concerns as his first. “My interest in writing is always talking about family,” he says. His short-term plans include devoting more time to his young son, freeing his wife to focus on her creative work—a move that’s in keeping with their shared vision for their own family.

“When I met my wife, we were both writing,” he says. “I think that’s an essential part of who we are.”

Read an essay by Wilson and an excerpt from his short story

“The Choir Director Affair (The Baby’s Teeth)”: snipurl.com/vu-wilson

Not Here, Not Now, Not That! Protest over Art and Culture in America

by Steven Tepper, associate professor of sociology and associate director of the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise and Public Policy (2011, University of Chicago Press)

Tepper’s book suggests that artists who simply cite the First Amendment, guaranteeing free speech, to defend their work aren’t cutting it in a “YouTube world,” where it is difficult for anyone to truly stop art from being disseminated. “Perhaps we can have more art, more controversy, more protest, more conversation, more obstacles, more alternatives, more community and more democracy,” he says.

What You Will: Gender, Contract and Shakespearean Social Space

by Kathryn Schwarz, associate professor of English (2011, University of Pennsylvania Press)

Noting that the pattern in 16th- and 17th-century representations of femininity is that women pose a threat when they conform too willingly to social conventions, Schwarz begins her book with an examination of early modern disciplines that treat will as an aspect of the individual psyche, of rhetoric, and of sexual and gendered identities. She then analyzes will through Shakespearean works in which feminine characters articulate and manage the values that define them, revealing the vital force of conventional acts.

In the Highest Traditions of the Royal Navy: The Life of Captain John Leach MVO DSO

by Matthew B. Wills, BA’54 (2011, The History Press, UK)

Wills tells the story of John Leach, analyzing the influences that shaped him and led ultimately to his heroic end. He traces Leach’s life from his time at Royal Naval College, Osborne and Britannia Royal Naval College in Dartmouth, his baptism by fire in the service when he survived a direct shell hit to the bridge where he was standing, and his time as captain of the Prince of Wales. The book presents a portrait of one of Britain’s finest, using new research on failures in navy intelligence as a major factor in the loss of HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Repulse.

Painting Dixie Red: When, Where, Why and How the South Became Republican

edited by Glenn Feldman, MA’86 (2011, University Press of Florida)

Has the South, once the “Solid South” of the Democratic party, truly become an unassailable Republican stronghold? If so, when, where, why and how did this seismic change occur? What are the implications for the U.S. body politic?

In Painting Dixie Red a distinguished group of scholars engages in this debate, some making the case that the South has become Republican and some contending that it has not.

Singer Chris Mann is a finalist on NBC's The Voice.

Singer Chris Mann, BMus’04, knows what it’s like to have the rug pulled out from under him. Just six weeks before his first album was scheduled to come out, the record company canceled the project.

“I had already recorded the strings in a studio next to where Barbra Streisand was recording,” Mann says. “I had performed at the Sundance Film Festival and at a pre-Oscar event—I thought my ship had come in. Then it ended, and it seemed like my career was over before it started.”

However, Mann made his way back into the studio and into very steady work singing for television shows like Glee and for feature films, including Avatar, Sex and the City II, and the latest version of The Muppets.

“Things I absolutely hated doing in school—like sight reading—gave me the skills to be able to walk into a studio and deliver,” he says. “It’s a very cutthroat industry, and I’ve broken in in a big way.”

Mann classifies himself as a classical crossover artist: Think Andrea Bocelli or Josh Groban, who has sold more than 24 million albums worldwide.

“Once I rededicated myself to the style I love and went with my gut, things really perked up for me,” Mann says.

Mann attracted the attention of legendary singer/songwriter/producer David Foster, who is credited with discovering Groban.

“David discovered Josh Groban and Michael Bublé and started taking them out on the road to sing in his ‘David Foster and Friends’ concerts,” says Mann. “He’s been great and has given me the same opportunity to perform in his shows—the first being at the Horatio Alger Awards ceremony in Washington, D.C., singing ‘The Prayer’ with Katharine McPhee. I’m honored and excited to be doing the same concerts Josh and Michael did when they were beginning.”

As exciting as all of that is, Mann’s biggest achievement may be just around the corner. He auditioned for Season 2 of The Voice, last year’s breakout show on NBC, and at press time was a finalist on Christina Aguilera’s team. The singing competition’s new season debuted Feb. 5, right after the Super Bowl. Stay tuned.

Find out more: chrismannmusic.com

Ken Diehl, BS’75 (left), and his brother, Robert, ’77

In the early summer of 2009, Ken Diehl started feeling poorly. He had been diagnosed with hypertension and IgA nephropathy—a kidney disease—several years earlier, but had been leading a normal life. For some reason, though, the disease became aggressive.

“My kidneys were only functioning at about 7 or 8 percent,” Diehl says. “The doctors were amazed that I was even walking around.”

Dialysis was the next step, but what Diehl really needed was a new kidney. Eight people volunteered to donate a kidney for him right then and there—an experience he says was humbling.

“They only went to the trouble to test one person, though, and it was a dead-on, perfect match,” Diehl says. That person was his brother, Robert, who also attended Vanderbilt. Their love for Vanderbilt baseball had made the brothers closer the past few years, and the gift of a kidney was another step in that direction.

“I don’t think I’ll ever get away from thinking about it every day—after all, I have pills to remind me,” says Diehl. “But it has been a tremendous blessing to me.”

The Diehl brothers urge everyone to consider organ donation—a gift of life.

Bartley with Campbell (now 6), Rider (now 2) and Keller (now 4)

Before her first child was born in 2005, Katie Peifer Bartley was terrified she’d never sleep again. She created a plan, though, and soon her daughter was, well, sleeping like a baby.

After the second daughter came along, friends noticed that Katie and her husband, David, never had that tired look that’s so common to many young parents.

“People started asking me how I got my children to sleep,” says Bartley, an avid Commodores fan who is proud of her time on the women’s soccer team while a student. “One day I was talking to a friend of a friend of a friend in Philadelphia, who stopped me after about 45 minutes and told me I should be charging for this advice.”

Today Bartley styles herself an infant sleep consultant. In the beginning she conducted an informal Facebook poll asking if people would pay to be able to sleep—and had 12 calls the first day. “I knew I had hit a nerve,” she says. “I thought people would be impressed with my master’s in social work, but all they really cared about was the fact that I had three young children who slept 12 hours a night.”

Bartley explains that most parents simply develop some bad habits early on. “Babies shouldn’t dictate how a parent’s life is being run,” she says. “I love my children, but I’m the parent. I have to encourage my clients to remember that they’re the ones in charge.”

Find out more: katiebartley.com.

Gabrielle Westbrook left her mark on Vanderbilt as a student. Today she’s leaving her mark on Washington, D.C., as a teacher.

As a senior, she wrote the resolution adopted by Vanderbilt Student Government successfully urging the administration to suspend classes on Martin Luther King Jr. Day in favor of a day of service and commemoration. “Reflecting on my experiences at Vanderbilt, I have discovered a common thread that has sewn my years here together: the power of change,” Westbrook says.

Now serving in her first year with Teach For America, Westbrook is working to change one of the nation’s most underprivileged school districts—in the heart of the nation’s capital. “I tell my students they deserve to be smart,” Westbrook says. “I tell them that no one else can determine their success, no matter their background.”

Westbrook’s message appears to be getting through. “I think they’ve really internalized the message because a lot of behavior patterns have changed,” she says. “The number of proficient students has doubled as well.”

Westbrook wants her students to reach for higher goals. “If a student tells me he wants to be a mechanic when he grows up, I ask him, ‘Why not be a mechanical engineer instead?’”

I dreamt of careening through forbidden forests on a bewitched broomstick and leading my house in a friendly game of Quidditch—probably akin to how previous generations imagined fighting droids (Star Wars), boldly going where no one has gone before (Star Trek), or saving Middle Earth (The Lord of the Rings). I always envisioned myself fitting in among the preppy tie-and-skirt set who attended the fictitious Hogwarts.

Growing up in Racine, Wis., I was so sold on the concept that I tried (unsuccessfully) to have my parents send me to boarding school. I requested brochures monthly during my final year of middle school, as if one more positive picture would sway my parents to give the thumbs up. But the closest I ever came to boarding school was sleep-away camp in upper Michigan—decidedly less cool than the rolling English countryside.

Allena Berry’s class was the first to experience living on The Martha Rivers Ingram Commons.

Imagine my unadulterated delight, then, when I discovered that Vanderbilt, the object of my postsecondary education aspirations, was erecting The Commons: 10 houses, 10 professors who lived among the students, and a dining hall with heavy, wooden tables just begging students to congregate around them with their cider and cocoa on cold, winter days. These and more were to make up the physical space of The Commons—impressive buildings with impressive rooms. I was sure I would nurse impressive thoughts there to match.

Now is as good a time as any to alert the reader to my unapologetic dorkiness. I squeal like a schoolgirl when BIC comes out with a new collection of pens. New class schedules elicit as much excitement for me as Christmas Day does for 5-year-olds. A residential college, then, was representative of all my dorky imaginings taking physical form. I was in nerd heaven.

“Forget boarding school,” I thought excitedly. “I want a residential college.”

Upon my acceptance to Vanderbilt, the pamphlets that bombarded my house in Wisconsin only fueled my expectations for my coming Commons experience. As part of the Class of 2012, my peers and I would be the first students to experience The Commons. The first.

After an entire adolescence of researching (informally, to be sure) the residential college experience, I had a checklist of expectations that were certain to be met—the least of them meeting my own Ron and Hermione best friends within the first five minutes on campus.

That was my frame of mind until my family’s minivan, filled to capacity with all the trinkets I had deemed necessary, pulled up to Murray House, my new home for the foreseeable future. After carrying my third suitcase up to the room (luckily, on the third floor), my parents began to soak in the Move-In Day atmosphere.

“It’s like a hotel,” my parent’s cooed as they admired my room, assured that the glossy brochures and welcome letters had adequately captured the intellectual environment in which they were about to leave their youngest daughter.

“Mmm-hmm … ,” I trailed off, dumbfounded and utterly speechless by the foreign space I now found myself in.

That sense of bewilderment was to stick with me for the next couple of weeks. A gross overachiever in a sea of gross overachievers, I was amazed and appalled by how much my research had failed me.

The Commons—now known as The Martha Rivers Ingram Commons at Vanderbilt—was nothing like Hogwarts. Nor was I one of the ever-smiling students featured in the brochures through which I had sifted with a fine-toothed comb before arrival.

This cognitive dissonance—the result of my reality not meeting my fantastical expectations—pushed me to ask the question: If this is nothing like what I’d imagined, then what exactly is the residential college experience supposed to be?

I spent the next six months in a misguided attempt to find the “perfect” Commons experience, one worthy of all my imaginings of it. But no matter how many individuals I sat with at one of those grand wooden tables in the dining hall, how many Commons lectures I attended, how many floor-bonding events I signed up for, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was doing this—the undergraduate, residential college thing—wrong.

As the guinea pigs of The Commons, my class was charged with the impossible task of setting the precedent for what the Commons experience should be without having a single model to follow. And I felt pressure to get it right this first time around, if not for my sake, then for those who would be looking toward me and my classmates for guidance in navigating their own Commons experiences. (Perhaps narcissism is also a result of the overachiever disease. The jury’s still out on that one.)

Only after my first year, when I had left The Commons—or, to use a more appropriate term, graduated from it and its luxuriously manicured lodgings—did I realize my fatal flaw. I was searching for an ideal, using propagandized brochures and Hollywood fantasies as fodder. Instead of creating my Commons experience, I had sought, in vain, to recreate an experience that never really existed.

Luckily for me, the nice folks over on The Commons don’t put up steel blockades barring you from entrance once you’ve moved on. Ever since my introduction to Vanderbilt, I have been capitalizing on the bright spots of my time on The Commons, getting to know professors and students whom I otherwise may not have befriended.

I met some of them at a dinner at the Commons dean’s house, where Peabody professors discussed their academic and research interests. And, irony of all ironies, it was at this dinner that I—the person who was “never, ever, never going to teach”—decided the field of education was more my speed than marketing.

I met more of these individuals on my floor, after listening to them practice their various instruments in the basement of Murray House. As a quasi-musician myself, I gravitated toward those with sonorous pursuits.

I even forged friendships at The Commons Center gym, affectionately dubbed “the estrogym” by the women who patronized it most frequently. With my comrades of the cardio, I developed a workout routine as a direct result of the proximity of the facilities to my dorm room. (And the Ben & Jerry’s supply in the Munchie Mart directly below it. After all, 45 minutes on the elliptical deserves at least one scoop.)

I didn’t find Dumbledore, or Ron, or Hermione. Instead I got to know a grab bag of people who existed outside a fantasy world: Dana, with whom I’ve lived since that first year. Rebecca, a girl who watched TLC’s What Not to Wear with a fervor to match my own. Brenden, a proud Texan with the drawl to prove it. These individuals, and others, were the ones I turned to when I needed a companion for coffee or a study break. I turned to them when I needed to laugh, cry or, at times, do a bit of both. (The fluctuation of postadolescent hormones may be one thing the movies got right.)

These people, and the memories that started on The Ingram Commons, are what I’ll take with me come graduation this May. As I apply to graduate schools of education with aspirations of becoming a middle school social studies teacher, I must stop myself from making the same mistake I made with The Commons. A movie is entertaining, but real life is infinitely more fulfilling.

The Ingram Commons doesn’t belong in a storybook, nor can a year’s residence there be relegated to pithy statements or two-dimensional photographs. The only “common” thing about the Ingram Commons experience is that it’s a uniquely individual journey that doesn’t stop when you shake your “first-year student” status.

My research did fail me, but I never would have come to that realization had I held on to fairy tales instead of embracing reality. That was a pretty nice realization to come to. It’s the very reason I am entirely indebted to my Commons experience—even if it meant abandoning all hopes of wielding a wand on the Quad.

In 1966, when my own mother was finally declared “mentally unfit to be a parent,” Granny became my legal guardian. It must have been difficult for this shy, rather Victorian woman in her 60s suddenly to be responsible for a teenager. At the time, she was a high school guidance counselor. However, she deftly wove my life into hers and we became the best of friends.

Granny set high standards both for my grades and my behavior, punctuated her sentences with Bible verses, listened to my long-winded stories, met all my boyfriends, insisted that I eat alfalfa sprouts, and even taught me yoga. More important, she encouraged any interest I had, whether it was collecting bugs or banging on the drums.

As a newlywed, Helen Hudson brought the grandmother who’d raised her home to live “for a few weeks,” which became 13 years.

“You can be many things in life, Dear,” she often said. “You don’t have to pick just one.”

Perhaps that explains why I also have never been bored. Granted, the one time I mentioned that I might be, she quietly replied, “An intelligent person is never bored.” But it just hasn’t happened—not in a classroom, a church, or even at a cocktail party. Put me anywhere, anytime, and I will occupy myself or others with a zest that sometimes surprises even me. I learned it from her.

She did embarrass me a bit during those teenage years, though. The other girls had “cool” moms in swishy dresses and high heels, with hair that flipped, fabulous nails and shiny lipstick. I had a gray-haired grandmother with old-fashioned spectacles who wore solid-color pantsuits and sensible flat shoes. But I knew even then that she was head and heels above the rest. Now, at almost 60 years old, I am even more certain of it.

We could not have been more different. It wasn’t just the half-century gap in our ages. Granny was shy and reserved. I was outgoing and, as she dubbed me early on, “a chatterbox.” My turbulent early years with a mother later diagnosed as schizophrenic made moments with Granny almost sacred. I took her advice to heart because I wanted to be as close to who she was as possible. To me she seemed like heaven itself. So the day she said to me, “Do what you can when you can. You won’t get a second chance,” I began seizing every moment possible.

At first the advice seemed merely practical. I mended that hole in my sweater because if I hadn’t, it would gape far and wide. I helped a classmate with homework because I still had 10 minutes before the bus came. As time went by, though, it became a habit so strong that I began to accomplish things with breakneck speed. I did my homework the same day it was assigned. If I had three weeks to read a book, I’d finish it in three days. The more I did, the more I realized what I could do. I became that principle in physics: A body in motion stays in motion.

Not only did I stay in motion, but the motion itself brought people and opportunities into my life that otherwise never would have happened. After graduating from Stanford University at 20, I taught high school English, took up the guitar, began writing songs, got a record contract, then a TV show, performed with artists like Don McLean and Billy Crystal, began acting, and worked with legends like Jason Robards, Tony Randall and Lucille Ball. By the time I was 35, I had met not one but two future U.S. presidents. But I am getting ahead of myself.

Granny set high goals for me and assumed I would simply meet them. She was a feminist before it was popular, yet was adamant that I know how to cook, clean and sew. Marriage never even entered my mind. Granny made it clear that I should “neither live with a man, nor marry one, until you have truly lived on your own and supported yourself.”

Even when dating, I could not let a boy pay for anything. “If you’re both doing something that you both enjoy, you both should pay your own ways,” Granny said. “Why should he pay for you?”

Granny was neither surprised nor impressed by anything I accomplished. Her own life had been unusual. Born on July 4, 1900, she graduated from Smith College in 1921 at a time when few women even went to college. Her youth was one of privilege, with a grand estate, servants and trips to Europe. John D. Rockefeller was a friend of her father and visited the family home. Yet, when the Depression took their fortune, she once told me, “It was a relief from all that responsibility.” She raised three children on her own without complaint because her moral compass never wavered from True North.

Grandmother had indirectly navigated my course for so long that it was a shock to find her slowly losing her own way barely a year after I married. She got lost on the way to the store, couldn’t find things or remember dates. She turned on the gas stove but forgot to turn it off. Her bills stacked up, unopened. The lights went out—and not just in her house. “Alzheimer’s” was not on anyone’s lips in 1981, and most said Granny was just getting old.

When my uncle called to say he was putting her in a nursing home, only one thought entered my mind—something I had said to her when I was 12. “When you get old, Granny, I will take care of you myself,” I promised. “I will never put you in a nursing home.” At the time, we had just returned from putting her mother in one, and the memory of leaving my beloved great-granny in that foul-smelling, wretched place haunts me still.

I hung up the phone and asked my new husband, John, if Granny could “stay with us for a few weeks.” To my joy, he replied, “Of course.”

During the next 13 years, the three of us did everything together: went to church, the gym, concerts, museums and even Disneyland, where we rode the Tea Cups. While our thirty-something friends were having children, we had Granny.

Living with us helped her regain much of her confusion, as she was now eating well, exercising and involving herself socially. I returned to performing at colleges across the country and hired a young woman to look after Granny in my absence. John’s office was nearby and life ran smoothly, albeit differently, for a while. In 1983 the National Association for Campus Activities honored me as Campus Entertainer of the Year. When I returned home, I found Granny and John watching basketball on TV and eating ice cream.

Her presence was a gift to us on many levels. As newlyweds we had few possessions. When Granny moved in, we had an entire house! She ameliorated arguments and added levity even without intending to. It was also good for others to see a young couple including an older person in their activities.

In 1990, I made The Guinness Book of Sports Records for being the first person to sing the national anthem at every major league baseball stadium. We celebrated Granny’s 90th birthday at a game of my final team, the San Diego Padres. Our whole family came, but Granny recognized only her brother, son and daughter. The others were a blur. As we left, she even asked, “What was the name of that familiar song you sang tonight, Dear?” The next morning, when I showed her my picture in the newspaper, she had no recollection of being there at all.

We moved from California to New York City and finally settled in Nashville, where I entered Vanderbilt to work on my master’s degree in human development counseling. During finals I gave birth to our daughter. Now we truly had two “babies” at home, though nearly a century was between them. Both wore diapers, took naps and ate mashed bananas. One brightened at the sound of my voice, and the other thought I was the maid. As our own child blossomed, Granny dwindled, then disappeared altogether.

Alzheimer’s did not have the last laugh, though. We did. Her lack of memory meant that we could still tell her every day that it was our birthday, and she would still sing “Happy Birthday” to us.

At 95, Granny Jo passed away at home with us. I shared our story in my book Kissing Tomatoes in the hopes that others would be encouraged to keep their loved ones close as they enter life’s final chapter. Sometimes I look back and think those years might well have been the happiest ones of Granny’s life. Come to think of it, she was a lucky girl, too.

You see Vanderbilt engineers very often moving into leadership positions. I think that’s because of the broader education they get at Vanderbilt.”

—Dean Ken Galloway, Vanderbilt School of Engineering

Ken Galloway, dean of Vanderbilt’s School of Engineering for 16 years, will transition to full-time faculty member July 1. Galloway is only the seventh dean in the history of the School of Engineering, which marks its 125th anniversary this year.

One of his achievements has been the recruitment and support of highly qualified faculty, who in turn have helped attract unprecedented research funding. During Galloway’s tenure, research expenditures from external sources grew from less than $10 million to more than $60 million annually.

Ken Galloway

“The dean has overseen the recruitment and retention of outstanding young faculty members who will contribute to Vanderbilt’s success for decades to come,” says Art Overholser, BE’65, senior associate dean and professor of biomedical engineering and chemical engineering. Since 2000, 27 School of Engineering faculty members have received National Science Foundation CAREER Awards.

Some of those hires have been fueled by the generous funding of 12 endowed chairs, which are vital to recruiting top faculty. Eleven of those were awarded within the past 10 years.

The physical appearance of the School of Engineering has changed dramatically as well. Thanks to Vanderbilt alumni and friends who answered the call for upgraded facilities, the Featheringill Hall–Jacobs Hall complex was completed in 2002. More recently, the university acquired space on Music Row at 16th Avenue South that is now home to the Institute for Software Integrated Systems, one of several centers and institutes under the School of Engineering aegis. The newest, the Vanderbilt Initiative in Surgery and Engineering, continues an evolving partnership with Vanderbilt University Medical Center.

Galloway, BA’62, has been a national leader and advocate before Congress for engineering and science education. Last year he was inducted into the Academy of Fellows of the American Society for Engineering Education. He is immediate past chair of the ASEE Engineering Deans Council and has served on the ASEE board of directors. He is currently a candidate to become president-elect of the ASEE.

The reputation of the School of Engineering has grown markedly during Galloway’s tenure. Engineering attracts some of the brightest students at Vanderbilt, with more than 4,300 of the most qualified applicants vying for 320 spaces in this year’s engineering and computer science freshman class. Women make up 34 percent of the current student body—about twice the national average for engineering schools.

“One of the really enjoyable things about having been dean at Vanderbilt is the opportunity to meet our alumni and to see how well they have used their Vanderbilt educations,” says Galloway. “You see Vanderbilt engineers very often moving into leadership positions. I think that’s because of the broader education they get at Vanderbilt.”

Succeeding Galloway as dean will be Philippe Fauchet, currently chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Rochester. Fauchet begins work at Vanderbilt July 1. Look for more about Fauchet in the next issue of Vanderbilt Magazine.

A rendering of the renovated Alumni Hall’s west elevation

One of the most architecturally significant and underused buildings on campus is about to get a whole lot busier. The Vanderbilt Board of Trust’s Executive Committee has voted to begin significant renovations to Alumni Hall in order to create flexible spaces to support a wide range of activities.

Increased student engagement and leadership on campus have created a need for additional meeting and gathering space. University officials say the number of student-led organizations has pushed available meeting space at nearby Rand Hall and Sarratt Student Center beyond capacity.

Construction is set to begin immediately after Commencement and conclude in July 2013. Expanded terraces, a new classroom, music lounge, exercise room, writing center, faculty office suite and café are planned for the Collegiate Gothic-style building originally completed in 1925.

Renovation funding will be provided by a combination of philanthropy and internal sources. Also, thanks to a generous gift from the Joe C. Davis Foundation, the Memorial Room on the second floor will be named in honor of 1941 alumnus Joe C. Davis Jr. A Vanderbilt tennis legend, Davis won SEC titles in 1939, 1940 and 1941. He was a longtime benefactor of the university and served on the Vanderbilt Board of Trust.

Having a renewed Alumni Hall also will benefit students living in the newest College Halls complex when it opens to approximately 660 upperclassmen in fall 2014 on the current site of Kissam Quadrangle. In May 2012 the six existing Kissam Quadrangle buildings will be demolished to make way for the two new residential colleges and a shared facility providing gathering space, dining, a classroom, offices and meeting rooms. (See Collective Memory article in this issue.)

Alumni Hall functioned as the university’s original student union for nearly 50 years. It was dedicated to the 44 Vanderbilt alumni, former students and faculty who died in World War I. Their names are carved in limestone above the Memorial Room’s fireplace mantels. As the premier campus social center, generations of students held tea dances in the Memorial Room, played pool in the basement, and conducted club meetings in the parlors. When Sarratt Student Center opened in 1974, Alumni Hall became home to a variety of administrative offices. The renovation project will be the first for the 87-year-old Vanderbilt landmark.

Their goal: to use that knowledge to tailor disease treatment and prevention strategies based on an individual’s own DNA blueprint, a concept often called “personalized medicine.”

Today patients at Vanderbilt University Medical Center are starting to reap the benefits of this research. Vanderbilt is one of a few medical centers beginning to use DNA information to personalize care.

So far, the approach is being used to inform treatment selection for certain patients whose DNA makeup suggests that a particular blood thinner or statin may not work for them. It is also being applied in cancer care, where testing of lung cancer and melanoma patients’ tumors for genetic changes is guiding the selection of treatments targeting those changes.

Vanderbilt’s leadership in developing personalized medicine is at the heart of a new communication initiative, “Promise of Discovery,” which is being seen across the country in such media as CNN, Fox News, National Public Radio, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post.

In addition to traditional media, the awareness campaign also leverages social media and interactive technology with My Health Chat, a monthly video chat that offers the chance to hear from and ask questions of researchers and physicians on the leading edge of medical advances.

The chats, which are streamed live on Facebook and VanderbiltHealth.com, have covered the genome and cardiac care, personalized medicine for cancer, and innovations in children’s care. Other topics scheduled include autism and developmental disabilities, cancer drug discovery, neurosciences and diabetes.

Find out more: MyHealthChat.com

The School of Nursing welcomed its largest class ever this academic year, including pre-specialty nursing students Audrey Pyle, left, and Brittany Powell, BA’11. A total of 486 students are pursuing master’s, doctor of nurse practice or Ph.D. degrees.

Vanderbilt has received a record 28,306 undergraduate applications for the fall 2012 semester, 3,658 (15 percent) more than at the same time last year.

The number of applications is up across all geographic regions and ethnic groups, says Douglas Christiansen, vice provost for enrollment and dean of admissions. All four undergraduate schools have seen a record number of applications.

“Vanderbilt is clearly fulfilling its promise as a national and world university,” Christiansen says. “We’re still processing the applications, but it appears that all the quality factors such as class rank, rigor of course work, leadership, extracurricular activities and test scores will all increase this year, too.”

The number of applications from international students increased 32 percent. Within the U.S., applications climbed by 29 percent in the West, 13.5 percent in the Southwest, 14.6 percent in the South, and 10 percent in the New York area. Increases were across all racial categories.

On the graduate level, applications were up 12 percent, with 7,855 received as of Jan. 15, says Dennis G. Hall, vice provost for research and dean of the graduate school.

Katie Ullmann has been named a 2011 Udall Scholar in recognition of her past commitment to environmental issues and her demonstrated commitment to a career in the environmental field. An American studies major and Ingram Scholar, Ullmann has focused on social movements and their effect on environmental and climate protection policies. Now a junior, the Brookline, Mass., student was one of 80 undergraduates selected nationwide—and one of only 27 sophomores—from a group of 510 students nominated by 231 colleges and universities. The scholarship from the Morris K. Udall and Stewart L. Udall Foundation provides up to $5,000 for her junior or senior year.

Seniors Justin Menestrina and Tim Xu were selected as Goldwater Scholars from a field of nearly 1,100 math, science and engineering students nominated by colleges and universities across the country.

Menestrina is a physics student from Knoxville, Tenn., conducting honors research in preparation for his senior thesis. Xu, of Vienna, Va., is completing a double major—with honors—in neuroscience and European studies. The Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Program provides each with a two-year scholarship worth $7,500 a year for educational expenses.

In addition, Greg Gauthier earned honorable mention in the Goldwater competition. The Wheaton, Ill., senior is working toward an honors degree in mathematics and economics while maintaining a 4.0 GPA.

But thanks to a partnership between Vanderbilt and Barnes & Noble, the old Borders space has morphed into a university bookstore serving both town and gown. The new store opened in November.

Barnes & Noble operates more than 630 campus bookstores across the U.S. for such institutions as Harvard, Yale, the University of Pennsylvania, Indiana University and Georgia Tech. In addition to offering items customers would expect to find at other Barnes & Noble retail outlets, the new bookstore offers Vanderbilt textbooks, course materials, apparel, other university items and a café.

And what happens to the old Rand Hall space? Last fall the Office of the Dean of Students conducted a feasibility study for repurposing the space, weighing suggestions provided by more than 1,300 students through focus groups, surveys and videos.

Work is now under way to create an additional dining room, a campus store to provide items typically stocked at Varsity Market locations, meeting and conference rooms, an extensive student organization and leadership suite, centrally located offices for the Office of Active Citizenship and Service, and more. Plans call for the majority of work to be completed by fall.

Food-friendly policies have taken effect throughout Vanderbilt’s Jean and Alexander Heard Library system since the recent addition of the Food for Thought Café in the Central Library. Food and drinks in covered containers are permitted in all libraries except for those areas with rare books and special materials.

Last year respondents to a Vanderbilt library survey expressed the desire to have food without having to leave the library building. The decisions to add a café and implement food-friendly policies were, in part, a response to the survey findings.

“Our libraries should be as welcoming and comfortable as possible,” says Connie Vinita Dowell, dean of libraries. “For our students who often study late into the evening, this is an especially important policy change.”

Food for Thought Café in the Central Library

Yeatman

Magazine Honors LifeFlight Director

Jeanne Yeatman, director of Vanderbilt LifeFlight, has been named by HealthLeaders magazine among its top 20 people nationwide who are “changing health care for the better.” The annual HealthLeaders 20 list profiles people who are playing a crucial role in making the health care industry better. Yeatman is the only Tennessean on the list, and the only person representing the air medical industry.

Murphy

Murphy Wins Lifetime Achievement Award

Joseph Murphy has won the 2011 Roald F. Campbell Lifetime Achievement Award from the University Council for Educational Administration (UCEA). The Campbell Award recognizes senior professors in educational administration whose professional lives have been characterized by extraordinary commitment, excellence, leadership, productivity, generosity and service.

Murphy is the Frank W. Mayborn Chair of Education and an associate dean of Vanderbilt’s Peabody College of education and human development. He is a past school administrator and founding chair of the Interstate School Leaders Licensure Consortium.

The Vanderbilt Melodores

Melodores among Top Collegiate Groups

The Vanderbilt Melodores, an all-male student a cappella group, has been lauded among the top 10 American collegiate a cappella groups for 2011 by The A Cappella Blog. The Melodores ranked No. 6 on the list, which also featured groups that have appeared on the NBC television show The Sing-Off, as well as the Tufts University Beelzebubs, who portrayed the fictional singing group The Warblers on Fox television’s Glee.

This sampling of adventures on the Reveses’ 41-foot trawler, Sweetgrass, has been adapted from their blog. After docking Sweetgrass in Mississippi for the winter, Captain Jerry, Admiral Jenny and ACE are set to begin the final leg of their journey. Follow their progress, and view maps, videos and more photos at sweetgrassadventures.com.

Jerry in New York Harbor

April 21, 2011: Charleston, S.C.

We plan on departing May 2 for our long-cherished dream of “doing the Loop.” Our cruise in 2010 to Martha’s Vineyard and back was spectacular, and we learned a great deal. Now we have upfitted Sweetgrass for the longer voyage. Things we have added include a wind indicator, Sirius weather to communicate with our Raymarine chartplotter, and a glass gauge to see how much water is in the water tanks.

May 5, 2011: Morehead City, N.C.

The great thing about this trip is that you get to see how things are along the way. There is never a dull moment, whether passing a statue of the Neptune family, an osprey setting up a home on a navigational marker, or a Confederate flag that reminds you where you are—especially as the 150th anniversary of “the war” has just begun.

One of the biggest mistakes one can make on these cruises is planning to be somewhere at a certain time. We must be in Norfolk, Va., on May 13 for the Great Loop Cruisers Association semiannual, and we have promised ourselves it will be the last firm date for the Great Loop—although there is a soft one for Nov. 16 on the Tennessee River at Knoxville for the Vanderbilt–University of Tennessee football game, about 4,000 miles from where we are now.

June 13, 2011: Manasquan, N.J.

We made a long, slow passage on the New Jersey intracoastal route, and it was very shallow the whole way, sometimes down to 4.5 feet. We never hit bottom, so it was a harrowing success. When we started out this morning, it was very foggy again and the wind was up to 25 miles per hour with waves of 4 feet. So we took the slower, shallower route—the lesser of two evils. We are in a nice anchorage in a place called Glimmer Glass.

ACE swam over to a huge, dead, foul-smelling fish and ate half of it. He has been swimming and we have washed him, but he still stinks.

June 18, 2011: Jersey City, N.J.

We are leaving the Atlantic Ocean. Sweetgrass has been in Atlantic waters the entire time we have had her—since 2005—and long before that.

The Atlantic for me has always been that water just outside the place I was born, Charleston. This certitude and this familiarity are what we now leave as we venture inland, first up the Hudson River, then the St. Lawrence Seaway, then two Great Lakes, and deeper and deeper into our country’s inland river system.

View of Manhattan from a marina on the Hudson River

June 28, 2011: Fort Edward, N.Y.

Traveling along this route has provided several challenges. One was a bridge with a height listed at 15 feet 6 inches. The height of our boat is 15 feet. We were concerned because the water level was very high after excessive rain. We slowly approached with Jenny sitting on top of the boat, holding a boat hook above our mast to see if we could clear the bridge. It was a railroad bridge, and a train went across just as we went under. We cleared it by 3 inches!

Most of these small towns are showing effects of the bad economy. Empty storefronts and boarded-up buildings are all that remain of the downtowns. The only things that seem to survive are an occasional diner, tattoo parlor, antique/consignment shop or barber shop. It is sad to see.

July 6, 2011: Quebec Province, Canada

With some last-minute fussing, we left Rouses Point, N.Y., and the United States. Adding to the anxiety was the captain’s realization that we were not legal for Canada with our “black water” overboard discharge for the aft cabin. We made preparations for the international border crossing by putting up our yellow quarantine flag and flying the Canadian flag from our mast.

Early in the morning the captain also discovered he had the wrong software to load on the chartplotter. This meant we were setting out to Canada with no electronic charting capability, which added a great deal of new stress. But with Jenny’s charm and the officer’s indulgence, we breezed through customs. We were in canals and did not need the charts.

Daredevil swimmers on the Trent River in Ontario

Aug. 11, 2011: Shoal Narrows, Georgian Bay (Canada)

We got to the exposed part of our route in the Georgian Bay and met waves of 4 to 6 feet—really bad. We almost had mutiny on Sweetgrass. After about 15 minutes of grueling and perilous passages among giant rocks, with waves lifting us in the air and coming from our beam, the crew chorus from Jenny and Paul Samuelson [a friend who was onboard for this leg of the journey] was, “We have to turn around! We cannot possibly make it through Hang Dog Narrows!” while the captain held onto the wheel, trying to make some sort of course through the wave-tossed markers that were barely visible. In all the pitching, God smiled on us since we probably should have hit the rocks beneath, but we did not. There had been a small marked channel that we went back to—the captain overruling his near-mutinous crew, who wanted to go back to Pointe au Baril. This was a nightmare experience for all of us, including ACE, who is still very upset.

Jenny samples a Chubby Mary in Leland, Mich.

When we finally got out of the seas and into that poorly marked little bay, a Canadian man and his young daughter in a runabout signaled us not to go where we were headed, but told us about a safe harbor nearby. He returned later in his boat to Sweetgrass, which was then safely anchored, and offered to host us at his cottage on the safe harbor bay. This gesture of friendship and assistance to strangers who were traumatized will always stand out as representative of the best one can encounter on the seas in a foreign land.

Aug. 28, 2011: Pentwater, Mich.

Our route took us over the graveyard of boats in Lake Michigan—nearly 70 sinkings of major boats have been recorded. We went to Sunday morning church at St. Peter’s Episcopal, a small chapel that was full and very lively. During the communion ritual, when the rector, Sam, got to us, he made a very special statement for all to hear—“Bless these and all boaters”—which touched us deeply.

Sept. 2, 2011: Chicago

We have been in Lake Michigan 12 days, traveling 379 nautical miles. The lake has the clearest water in the northern part, and it is almost a mystical experience to look 15 or 20 feet down and see the sand bottom as we did at Beaver Island, Mich. What I will not miss about Lake Michigan is its uncertainty of weather and the bad conditions that one inevitably encounters, even when being cautious. On our trip from Beaver Island to Charlevoix, Mich., we were dealing with 4- and 5-foot waves.

Sweetgrass navigates the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal.

In Chicago, I leave Lake Michigan with an ambivalence and deep respect. There were times I hated and dreaded going out, and other times of restful beauty that made me so glad to be alive and on these waters. The changes in mood and feeling were like the lake itself: up and down, with strong winds and gray skies and white-capped waves, or fantastically placid with gorgeous colors of blue and pink making distinctions of sky and sea one seamless transition. We have completed nearly half the Loop now.

Oct. 7, 2011: Towhead Island, Ky. (near Paducah)

Today marked the end of our voyage on two of America’s great rivers, the Ohio and the Mississippi. We were on the Ohio for only 59 nautical miles, and that was enough. It is wide and busy, but had more towns along it than the stretch of Mississippi we were on. There were pretty spots along the Ohio, but its width and hundreds of barges made it hard to enjoy.

This building still stands on what used to be the bank of the Tennessee River before it was dammed to create hydroelectric power and prevent the Ohio River from flooding.

Nov. 11, 2011: Lenoir City, Tenn. (near Knoxville)

We rented a car and drove to Nashville. It took 2.5 hours going 70 miles per hour. That is 10 times faster than Sweetgrass could have done it.

We saw the Vanderbilt men and women beat their opponents in basketball, and then on Saturday attended a “summit” meeting about the future of Vanderbilt athletics that was fascinating. The people who can make it happen—Board of Trust, chancellor and coaches—are all dedicated to a new goal of not just competing in the Southeastern Conference, but being champions in the conference. And earlier in the month, the women’s cross country team did become SEC champions.

The football game was terrific. We had been told in the morning, “Coach Franklin says we will beat UK.” And we didn’t just beat them—we dominated like I had never seen any Vanderbilt football team do against a fellow SEC team.

The Hiwassee River at Charleston, Tenn.

Nov. 19, 2011: Knoxville, Tenn.

Today is the day we’ve had on the calendar for about five years—the day on the calendar after my retirement that Sweetgrass could be in Knoxville to see the battle between two schools that have only one thing in common: Both reside in Tennessee. By good luck, the University of Tennessee is having a down year and Vanderbilt under our new coach is playing well. I write these comments several hours before kickoff with enough optimism to think we just might win this year.

Nov. 20, 2011: Lenoir City, Tenn.

We are backtracking. We’re going all the way back to the mouth of the Tennessee River–Tombigbee Waterway at Pickwick Lake. The cruise today was mournful because of the devastating football loss last night. The weather is overcast and gray, and we are having problems with our navigation computer.

The Sweetgrass in Crimson Tide country.

Nov. 26, 2011: Guntersville, Ala.

Today is Saturday, the second day of duck hunting season. We awoke to volley after volley of shotgun fire because we were in a very duck-intense and protected body of water. Duck blinds were all around us with a lot of shooting around dawn. I looked at ACE, wondering if this would awaken any instinct to go out and see if there were ducks to retrieve, but he was interested only in his food.

Morning fog on the Hiwassee River

Dec. 1, 2011–March 2012: Iuka, Miss.

We had a nice final cruise for the year. Sweetgrass will spend the winter in Iuka. Leaving the Tennessee River, as we have now done, is another bittersweet time. We hate to say goodbye to such a good friend and a river that holds a lifetime of memories. But we are headed home for the holidays to see our grandchildren and to make more memories before getting back on Sweetgrass for the final leg of the Loop.

Award nominees may be alumni of any Vanderbilt college or school. The award is presented, when merited, to extraordinary individuals who have devoted themselves to addressing the needs of humankind and have positively impacted the lives of others in doing so. While not necessarily well known, nominees should reflect Vanderbilt’s stated values of “intellectual freedom that supports open inquiry” and the ideals of equality, compassion and excellence in all endeavors.

If selected, the award recipient will be honored during Reunion 2012 in October. For more information, a list of previous award recipients, or to submit a nomination online, go to vanderbilt.edu/alumni/association/distinguished-alumni.

Alumni also are encouraged and invited to recommend candidates for service on the Vanderbilt Alumni Association Board of Directors, as well as candidates for the office of president-elect. Again, nominations are due April 13.

Candidates for the seven open board positions must be degree-holding alumni. Ideal nominees are those who have the ability to serve and support Vanderbilt in various capacities and who have the time and resources to attend three board meetings per year and serve on board committees. It is vital that these individuals have interest in and enthusiasm for service on this active advisory board. Those selected will be asked to serve a three-year term beginning July 1, 2012.

The president of the Alumni Association serves a two-year term. On July 1 the board’s current president-elect, Carroll Kimball, will take the presidential reins from John Hindle, leaving the president-elect position open for nominations.

For more information about the board or to submit a board member nomination online, go to vanderbilt.edu/alumni/board-of-directors. To nominate a president-elect candidate—or for any other questions or comments about nominations being sought this year—you may contact James Stofan, associate vice chancellor for alumni relations, by phone at (615) 343-4099 or by email at james.stofan@vanderbilt.edu.

COVER: Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital patient Ansley McLaurin gets a backstage tour of the Grand Ole Opry House from Rascal Flatts members Jay DeMarcus, Joe Don Rooney and Gary LeVox. Rascal Flatts, who recently became the newest members of the Opry, personifies the growing trend of Nashville entertainers who share their time and talents with Vanderbilt University Medical Center. Ansley has been treated successfully for a primary lung tumor. For more about Vanderbilt’s partnership with the music industry, read "Honky-Tonk Heroes and Healing Hands" in this issue. Photo by John Russell.

Franklin

The first year of the James Franklin-coached Vanderbilt football saga got off to an exciting start as the Commodores finished the regular season with a 6–6 record, two SEC wins, and a postseason bowl berth.

Franklin was named head coach of the Vanderbilt football program in December 2010 following back-to-back 2–8 seasons that produced only one SEC win. The Commodores had a fast start to the 2011 season with three home wins, including a victory over Ole Miss. They took a 5–6 record into the regular season finale at Wake Forest and emerged with a decisive 41–7 victory.

“People wanted to tell me all the things we can and can’t do,” Franklin remembers about his arrival at Vanderbilt. “It’s the same things people have been telling me my whole life, and that’s not what we’re about. We’re about having a positive attitude, working hard, and competing in everything we do, and we’re willing to sacrifice to get there.”

For the seniors, the only class in Vanderbilt football history to play in two bowl games, the season was particularly sweet.

“This senior class has been through a lot,” senior tight end Brandon Barden says of earning a bowl bid. “We’ve been through three head coaches, and we’ve worked our butts off since we got here. This is what we dreamed of.”

The AutoZone Liberty Bowl in Memphis, Tenn., matched Vanderbilt against the University of Cincinnati on New Year’s Eve. Vanderbilt fans showed their appreciation by buying up the Commodores’ ticket allotment—and more—and taking over the Bluff City. The Bearcats overcame the Commodores by a touchdown in a 31–24 nail-biter.

In December, Vice Chancellor David Williams announced that Franklin had received a new contract with extended years and a substantial pay increase. In addition, the university has committed to facility improvements at Vanderbilt Stadium and has preliminary plans to construct an expansion of the current student recreation center, pending approval from the Board of Trust, that would include a 120-yard turf field and a 300-meter track, as well as expanded areas for cardio and other sports activities.

A complete team effort resulted in Vanderbilt’s first SEC championship in women’s cross country.

The Vanderbilt women’s cross country team ran away with its first Southeastern Conference championship during October in Maryville, Tenn. Five Commodores finished in the top nine for a total of 30 points, far ahead of second-place Arkansas. It was the first time since 1989 that a school other than Arkansas, Florida or Tennessee had won the title.

“We always said we had to get over the hump,” reflects head coach Steve Keith, “and we believed we could this year. To get our first win with such a performance was very impressive.”

Senior Alexa Rogers finished second, sophomore Liz Anderson finished fourth, and junior Jordan White, senior Louise Hannallah and junior Kristen Smith finished seventh, eighth and ninth, respectively. Rogers, Anderson and White were named to the All-SEC first team, and Hannallah and Smith made the second team. Grace Orders, Rebecca Chandler and Amira Joseph finished in the top 30, earning All-SEC freshman honors.

The SEC victory propelled the Commodores to the NCAA championships for the first time in school history. The runners exceeded Keith’s hopes for a top-10 finish by placing sixth in a 31-team field. Once again Rogers led the way, finishing 39th overall, and established another Vanderbilt first when she received All-American honors. “Alexa Rogers is our first All-American, and Liz Anderson missed by maybe just a second and a couple of places,” Keith says.

Along the way, Keith was named SEC Cross Country Coach of the Year. Keith, BA’81, is in his sixth year as head coach. “It’s a nice honor,” he says. “I believe 100 percent that these women can achieve whatever they set their minds to.”

Nine Commodores joined the Class of 2011 Vanderbilt Athletics Hall of Fame: Lamar Alexander, BA’62, track and field; Tyler Griffin, BA’06, women’s soccer; Carl Hinkle, BA’38, football; John R. Ingram, MBA’86, lifetime achievement; Peter Lamb, BA’80, men’s tennis; David Latimer, BA’98, cross country; Scotti Madison, BA’81, baseball; Will Perdue, BA’88, men’s basketball; and Sheri Sam, BS’96, women’s basketball.

Men’s Basketball: Jenkins Sets World Games Record

Vanderbilt junior John Jenkins set a U.S. men’s World University Games record with six 3-pointers in a 102–53 U.S. victory over Hungary during international competition in Shenzhen, China, last August. He went 6 for 10 in 16 minutes of play.

Women’s Soccer: Greene Named Head Coach

Less than a month before the fall season began, Derek Greene was named head coach of the women’s soccer team after the retirement of former coach Ronnie Woodard. Greene has been an assistant coach with the Commodores since February 2010. Despite several injuries, the team finished with an 8–11 record and defeated previously unbeaten SEC rival LSU. Midfielder Cherrelle Jarrett was named to the 2011 SEC Women’s Soccer All-Freshman Team.

Women’s Golf: Vanderbilt Legends Club Hosts 2012 NCAA Championship

The 2012 NCAA Division I women’s golf championship will be played at Vanderbilt Legends Club in Franklin, Tenn., May 22–25. Twenty-four teams and individuals from teams that don’t make the cup will participate. “This is an outstanding event, and we are absolutely thrilled to serve as the host institution,” says Head Women’s Golf Coach Greg Allen.

*laxabunga (lak sǝ buή´ gǝ) exclam. [slang] used as an exclamation of delight and laxifaction by laxers (lacrosse players). See also laxaholic.

Senior Ally Carey is one of 10 players from Maryland on the women’s lacrosse team.

Ally Carey grew up with a soccer ball attached to her foot.Following in her soccer-oriented father’s footsteps, she played the sport all the way through high school. At a young age she had it all planned out. She was going to emulate her childhood idol, Mia Hamm, and play soccer for North Carolina and then—she hoped—Team USA.

“I didn’t want to give up soccer at all,” she says. In the fourth grade, however, Carey started playing lacrosse. Beginning with a wooden stick—most club teams use aluminum sticks with plastic heads—she began to develop a connection with lacrosse.

Her fondness for the sport grew at John Carroll High School in Bel Air, Md. Summers and falls became dedicated to soccer. When winter hit, she took out the lacrosse stick. As her high school days wound down, Carey faced a difficult decision. She could try to play both soccer and lacrosse in college, but she feared it would be too much to juggle. So she made up her mind, which turned out to be surprisingly easy.

“I had more confidence in lacrosse than soccer—and definitely made a good choice.”

Vanderbilt certainly thinks so. Last June the 5-foot-8 midfielder became the first Vanderbilt lacrosse player to be named a first-team All-American twice. She is the school’s all-time leader in draw controls (183), and last year she ranked nationally in the top 10 for draw controls, caused turnovers and ground balls, which are similar to steals. She was a nominee for the Tewaaraton Award, which is given annually to the top men’s and women’s lacrosse players in the country. And last November Lacrosse Magazine announced her as one of four finalists for its Preseason Player of the Year Award.

“We’d like to take credit for a lot of [her success], but what she has accomplished as an athlete is because of her drive,” says Vanderbilt Women’s Lacrosse Head Coach Cathy Swezey. “She is just a gifted kid with a tireless work ethic who really has made a great difference in our program.”

Carey is only the most prominent example of how Vanderbilt benefits from Maryland’s historic strength in lacrosse. Maryland has contributed 10 players to the current squad, six of whom are seniors, and one-third of the early signees for next year also hail from the Old Line State.

Carey at age 10, as a wing player for the Abingdon Football Club Tornados

Even before she arrived at Vanderbilt, Carey was soaking in experiences that many dream about. As a junior in high school, she was picked to compete with Team USA in the International Federation of Women’s Lacrosse Associations’ U-19 (under 19) World Championship in Canada. Despite being one of the team’s—and tournament’s—youngest players, she earned Player of the Match honors in the semifinal against England. She then helped her teammates claim the gold in dominating fashion over Australia.

Goosebumps climb her arms as she recalls chanting “U-S-A, U-S-A” with the crowd in Ontario. “I can’t even put into words what it feels like to have ‘USA’ across your chest,” she says. “The red, white and blue in the stands just makes you so proud to represent your country. It was an amazing experience.”

Carey wants to experience that feeling again—on an even bigger stage. She is one of 36 players on the US Lacrosse women’s national senior team, along with Vanderbilt assistant coach Amber Falcone. The squad participated in a tournament during October and reunited in January. Come July, though, everyone must try out again and crack the final 18 in order to play in the 2013 World Cup in Canada. More immediately, as a senior captain, Carey is focused on helping the Commodores win an American Lacrosse Conference championship and reach elite status nationally. “I’m still wanting that national title,” she says.

Carey graduates in May with a degree in human and organizational development and a minor in marketing. She hopes to land a job at Under Armour, a sports clothing and apparel company based in Baltimore where she interned last summer. Eventually, she would like to work with the company’s new lacrosse product line. “They are extremely efficient, but they also have a great time,” she says of the company. “It is totally the place I want to be—a perfect fit, kind of like here at Vanderbilt.”

Jerome Boettcher is a sports reporter for Nashville City Paper.

Bob Whaley, known throughout the financial world as developer of the Market Volatility Index (“Fear Index”), returned in 2006 to the Vanderbilt Owen School faculty, where he had begun his teaching career 28 years earlier.

Bob Whaley gets excited about the place where research and the marketplace collide. In fact, it’s an intersection that goes to the heart of his professional life.

“I don’t believe in theory for theory’s sake,” says the Valere Blair Potter Professor of Finance at the Vanderbilt Owen Graduate School of Management. “I want to take the idea somewhere. If somebody gives me a mathematical model and there is no data for me to test its predictive power or no practical application for which I can use it, I lose interest.”

It’s a quest that led Whaley in 1992 to develop one of the most talked-about indices in modern financial history: the Market Volatility Index, or VIX, a measure of investor jitters that quickly came to be known as the Fear Index. And most recently, he and Owen colleague Associate Professor Jacob Sagi developed Alpha Indices, which help traders isolate the performance of individual stocks or commodities against broader exchange-traded funds, giving them an important new investment tool.

In between, Whaley has earned international recognition in the world of finance on both the academic and market sides of the equation. Known as a foremost expert in derivative contract valuation and risk management, and for his knowledge of market microstructure and volatility, he has written eight books and scores of articles. His research includes widely regarded work with Owen colleague Professor Hans Stoll about the triple witching hour and work on expiration-day effects on, and market manipulations of, index futures and options. Concurrently, he helped bring Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business into the front ranks of business schools before returning in 2006 to Owen, where he had begun his teaching career 28 years earlier.

The VIX—a weighted blend of options prices developed for the Chicago Board Options Exchange to gauge the market’s anticipation of short-term stock volatility—quickly became one of the most closely watched indices in times of economic turmoil. Whaley became a sought-after commentator in the financial and general press, especially when the index spiked, as it did in 2008, reaching near-panic levels during the run-up to that year’s presidential election.

“It’s been pleasing to see the VIX as a standard for investor anxiety,” says Whaley, “but it didn’t take that additional step, which was product creation, until much later. It was a little disappointing that the futures contracts on the VIX Index didn’t get launched until 2004 and the options in 2006.”

On the other hand, the Alpha Indices, designed for the NASDAQ OMX Group to help protect investors against market fluctuations that can erase relative performance gains, came much more quickly to the marketplace.

“We presented the final version of our framework in July 2010 and then went through the regulatory process, got SEC approval, and got the Options Clearing Corp. to change its rules describing how these things clear and what risk disclosure documents there should be,” says Whaley. “The instruments began to trade in April 2011—less than a year since product inception. All my research in some way is applied, and it’s just nice to see an idea used in the marketplace in such an unusually compressed time frame.”

In fact, the initial group of indices is already being supplemented.

Whaley, left, and Owen colleague Jacob Sagi were invited to ring the opening bell at NASDAQ in New York in April 2011 to celebrate the start of options trading on a new group of indexes the two developed.

“The first seven track stocks vs. the market,” says Whaley, “so you’re trying to isolate individual stock outperformance. The next ones, which are going through regulatory approval now, will isolate commodity outperformance such as gold vs. the stock market.”

They are, adds Sagi, “the kind of thing that demonstrates how you can take research-based knowledge and apply it in a way that helps people and brings value to the market.”

That approach began to take shape for Whaley during his undergraduate days at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, where he grew up. He began in computer science, taking finance courses that would allow him practical problems to work on. Eventually, he says, “it was almost exclusively finance.”

Dwight Grant, then a University of Alberta professor and now with Pricewaterhouse-Coopers in San Francisco, says, “I met Bob when he took an introductory finance class. I asked a very difficult question—it required a synthesis of algebra, geometry and economics—and Bob was the only person in the class who saw what the answer was, and he saw it quickly. It was a flash of insight and an indication of the quickness that he has demonstrated over and over throughout a very distinguished career.

“Then, during his senior year, Bob did a research project and we co-authored a paper in the Journal of Business, which is pretty unusual for an undergraduate to do. I’ve often joked that at the time I thought I was being very gracious and virtuous for including Bob’s name on the article and guiding him through the process, but that anybody examining our careers would have to conclude that he was a very gracious undergraduate to include and carry me through that article.”

Whaley earned an MBA and Ph.D. at the University of Toronto and felt professors “pushing” him toward the United States.

“I was interested in a strong research institution,” he says, “and that’s when I came to Vanderbilt in 1978.” He followed a short Vanderbilt teaching stint with a year in Chicago as vice president of research for a futures brokerage firm, putting his passion for derivatives to work in industry until the desire for autonomy drew him back to academia and the University of Alberta. The weather there convinced his wife, Sondra, a Tennessee native, to steer them southward again.

“Everything was going fine until the end of September, when it snowed 12 inches or something,” he says. “It quickly disappeared, but then in the second week of October, it snowed 27 inches. She looked out, and there was a wall of snow halfway up the door.”

That December, while he was at a conference in Germany, Sondra answered a call from the dean of the business school at the University of Chicago asking if Whaley would be interested in a visiting appointment.

“‘Yes, he would,’ she told them,” he says with a laugh. “She had the deal lined up before I got home. Of course, the University of Chicago was the best finance school in the world.” While he was at Chicago, a number of schools tried to lure him, and the desire for warmer weather led them to Duke.

“Duke had gutted its finance area and wanted someone to rebuild it, so I wound up taking over the finance area,” he says. “During the next 20 years we built what is widely regarded as one of the top 10 finance programs in the country.” In fact, the top-tier Journal of Finance now boasts two editors and three associate editors recruited by Duke under Whaley’s leadership.

When the Owen School inquired about the possibility of Whaley’s return, he says, “I took a tremendous liking to [former chancellor] Gordon Gee and [current chancellor] Nick Zeppos. I knew what I could do in finance and wanted to see if it was possible to do that sort of strengthening more broadly.”

In 2006, Whaley returned to Owen, where in addition to his professorship he serves as co-director of the Financial Markets Research Center. Two years later the economic downturn cut into Vanderbilt’s endowment, as it did at institutions across the country, affecting the Owen School’s ability to recruit and prompting the discontinuation of its Ph.D. program. Still, Whaley is upbeat about the “pockets of excellence” throughout Owen. He is particularly drawn to colleagues who are strong as researchers and teachers, those who have demonstrated a personal commitment to the institution.

And he has equally impressed colleagues.

“Once he has the idea,” says Stoll of their joint work, “he’s relentless in working it through. He has a tremendous work ethic. He’s also turned into a terrific writer, so you couldn’t ask for a better colleague.”

Whaley remains excited by the dynamics of the academy.

“If you were to take a job in industry,” he says, “you would be channeled in one direction or another and someone would be setting your tasks for you. In academia, you set your own agenda and explore the ideas you want to explore. The test is convincing other academics as well as journal editors of the importance of those ideas.”

Just as he balances research, teaching and business, Whaley is happy for those moments when he can mix family and career. One recent opportunity came when he and Sagi were invited to New York with their families to ring the opening bell at NASDAQ. Two of his three children were able to attend, and one was watching on TV.

“Ringing the bell was exciting,” he says, “but having my wife and family there made it that much better. I was just proud of my children being proud of their dad. It’s a priceless memory.”

Michael Greshko blogged about his college selection process for The New York Times.

During the spring of my senior year of high school, as I sallied forth ready to do battle with everything life threw my way, one herculean task remained: my college choice.

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, 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, how was I going to describe my choice to readers around the world?

The latter question had emerged during a lunchtime phone call in February, leading to one of those moments I’d never envisioned: The New York Times wanted me to outline my college decision-making process as a guest blogger.

I enthusiastically signed on—but I was also nervous. The pressure to live up to the Times name was enormous. I felt up to the challenge, though, so as I dove into my deliberation—replete with campus visits to Vanderbilt and Yale and talks with students, admissions officers and deans—I made it my goal to have fun with every word.

As spring progressed and I continued my blog series, my gut slowly but surely transitioned to Vanderbilt, my writing serving as a means of distilling and clarifying my feelings. After announcing my choice, I ended my blog series in late June, but as I submitted my final post, faint pangs of second-guessing began to settle in. Had I made the right choice?

After finishing a lightning-fast first year in the College of Arts and Science, I turned out to be right; it was an 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 world view and pushed me in ways I needed to be pushed.

About two weeks into my first 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 Martha Rivers Ingram Commons’ end-of-year festivities. And I spent last summer with Vanderbilt’s VISAGE program in Costa Rica.

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 last fall. I know I made the right choice. I hope that they, too, will feel the same.

Michael Greshko is a sophomore majoring in ecology, evolution and organismal biology and minoring in Spanish.

Situated on what is now Alumni Lawn, the original Kissam Hall was the first large, “modern” dormitory on campus. Crowned with two cupolas, the impressive building was funded by William Kissam Vanderbilt and finished in 1900. It served the university 57 years.

When Vanderbilt opened its doors in 1875, there were no dormitories on campus and no plans for any—ever. On the contrary, the initial catalog specifically stated that dormitories were thought to be “injurious to both morals and manners” of young men. The catalog went on to say that it was “far safer to disperse young men among the private families of an intelligent and refined community.”

Actually, a few students enrolled in the biblical department were allowed to live on campus in a former residence that stood on land purchased by Bishop Holland McTyeire in 1873. It came to be known as “Wesley Hall” and stood on what is today Library Lawn until it was razed to make space for “new” Wesley Hall, which opened in 1880, thanks to a generous donation from William Henry Vanderbilt, the eldest son of the university’s founder, Cornelius Vanderbilt. That grand building served the biblical department/theological department/school of religion (now known as Vanderbilt Divinity School) with classrooms, a library, reading room, chapel, parlor, cafeteria, and rooms for students and faculty.

After Wesley Hall burned in 1932, the university purchased the YMCA building across 21st Avenue (present site of Wesley Place Garage) to house the school of religion. The building was renamed “Wesley Hall,” with the former Wesley referred to as “Old” Wesley.

By 1886 the administration’s attitude toward dormitories had changed, and with a legacy left to the university by William Henry Vanderbilt, six cottages were built to house students. Each two-story cottage contained eight rooms (four over four), each with its own outside entrance. In order to discourage intermingling, no interconnecting doors were constructed.

A corner fireplace heated each room, with coal stored in the basement. Oil lamps provided lighting. Each room was supplied with a large bowl and water pitcher for students’ grooming—shaving and face washing. A community pump, centrally located in front of the cottages, provided water.

Other “conveniences” were found just south of the last cottage. Showers and indoor toilets were located in the basement of the gymnasium (now part of the Office of Undergraduate Admissions) several yards to the east. West Side Hall was built the next year to provide dining facilities. (Part of that structure remains today as a portion of the undergraduate admissions building constructed in 1992.)

These Spartan facilities, known as West Side Row (five remain standing today), served 96 occupants each year. But more housing was needed with modern conveniences longed for by students.

William Kissam Vanderbilt

On April 3, 1899, Chancellor James H. Kirkland informed the Board of Trust that W.K. Vanderbilt had offered to erect a new dormitory on campus. The April 7 Vanderbilt Hustler headlines announced: “Mr. William K. Vanderbilt Makes a Magnificent Gift to the University; The University Gets One Hundred Thousand Dollars; A New Dormitory of Modern Design to Be Built on West Side Row; Richard H. Hunt Is Drawing the Plans; Work to Begin Very Soon.”

William Kissam Vanderbilt, a son of William Henry and grandson of Cornelius Vanderbilt, was making possible the first large, “modern” dormitory on campus. The renowned New York architectural firm of Hunt and Hunt, employed by the Vanderbilt family to plan some of their opulent residences, was chosen to design the building. Richard Howland Hunt, the junior partner, was the son of Richard Morris Hunt, who had been chief architect for such Vanderbilt family mansions as Biltmore House, The Breakers and Marble House.

Sited on the south end of today’s Alumni Lawn, the four-story dormitory built over a daylight basement was an imposing structure of brick trimmed in stone. Built in a “U” shape that faced University Hall (now Kirkland Hall), the dormitory was crowned with two impressive cupolas. Four firewalls, positioned to prevent the spread of fire, also provided privacy to smaller sections of the building. Most of the building was arranged in three-room suites consisting of a study flanked by two single bedrooms. Single rooms also were designed to accommodate one or two students. The building was heated by steam radiators, with fireplaces also provided. Electricity supplied the lighting. Bathrooms “fitted up with every convenience” were located in the basement.

The dormitory itself was built to house 175 students, both professional (law) and undergraduate. The dormitory’s dining room accommodated 300 students, including residents of West Side Row.

Construction delays prevented the dormitory’s opening as planned in the spring of 1900, in conjunction with the university’s 25th anniversary. The celebration was delayed until that fall’s meeting of the Board of Trust. The building was formally presented to the university in October by W.K. Vanderbilt (in absentia) as a memorial to his mother, Maria Louisa Kissam Vanderbilt, who had died in 1896. Positioned in the middle of the front wall of the building was a large engraved, gilded memorial plaque of Tennessee marble.

Now displayed at the northeast corner of Tolman Hall, the plaque reads: “Kissam Hall erected by William Kissam Vanderbilt in memory of his mother Maria Louisa Kissam Vanderbilt MDCCCC.” Married to William Henry Vanderbilt for 44 years, Maria Louisa Kissam was the mother of nine children, some of whom continued to take an interest in the university founded by their grandfather.

“Kiss ’em all!”

A few students were admitted as residents in February 1901, and the first full admittance followed in the fall of that year. Total cost of the building given by W.K. Vanderbilt, according to Board of Trust minutes, was $144,339.02.

“Old” Kissam Hall served the university well for 57 years and became a legend in its time with countless stories of its residents’ shenanigans. The correct pronunciation of “Kissam” places the accent on the second syllable, but many residents enjoyed calling their dorm “Kiss ’em all!”—pun intended. A familiar cry heard up and down the halls of Kissam was “Heads out!” when coeds passed along the sidewalks below.

After World War II, with an influx of young men returning to their educations, Kissam Hall was stretched beyond its capacity. In an attempt to make it safer, wooden fire escapes were erected around the building. Two new dorms, McGill Hall and Tolman Hall, were built in 1947 just a few yards behind Kissam. Cole Hall was added in 1949, and Barnard and Frederick William Vanderbilt halls followed in 1952.

During its May 1955 meeting, the Board of Trust decided to raze the venerable old Kissam rather than put an estimated $1.5 million into renovation. A new committee, Campus Planning and Architecture, was appointed to investigate possible sites for a new dormitory to replace Kissam.

The Board of Trust approved construction of a six-dormitory complex to begin in the spring of 1956. Plans specified that the location was not to interfere with Curry Field, the open green space just to the south. Originally, the dorms were to be arranged in two groups of three, with colonnades connecting so that one house mother could serve three dorms. The three-story structures each were to include about 100 single rooms, with special sections for law students, medical students, other graduate students and undergraduate students. They would accommodate approximately 300 male students who had been housed in Kissam and Cole halls, plus about 300 students who had been living off campus.

Edward Durell Stone of New York City, the university’s consulting architect in the late 1940s, was chosen as the designer. A native of Arkansas, Stone was world renowned. Educated at the University of Arkansas, Harvard and MIT, he had worked with other architects in designing Rockefeller Center in New York City.

The six residence halls making up Kissam Quadrangle have stood near the intersection of West End and 21st avenues since 1957. They will be razed in May to make room for two new residential colleges.

Estimated cost for the new quadrangle was $2 million. Application was made for two loans of $1 million each to the U.S. Housing and Home Finance Agency at 2.75 percent interest. On May 4, 1956, with loans approved, the Board of Trust announced that plans for the six dormitories had been completed and approved by the U.S. Housing Administration and that the project was to be put out for bids. The next month, the Board of Trust approved the demolition of “old” Kissam to proceed as soon as assurance could be made that the new dorms would be complete for September occupancy. Room rental for the new dorms was set at “not less than $270 per academic year and $70 for the summer quarter.”

Although the name was not officially announced by the board until Nov. 1, the Sept. 20, 1957, issue of the Hustler announced that “Kissam Quadrangle” had opened, leaving Cole and Tolman halls available for undergraduate and graduate women. Freshman women were assigned to McTyeire Hall, while freshman men were assigned to McGill, Barnard and Vanderbilt halls.

At that November meeting, Chancellor Harvie Branscomb reported to trustees that “the beautiful new quadrangle” had been completed on schedule and assigned to upperclassmen, with one dormitory reserved for graduate and professional students. The chancellor went on to describe the buildings as “modern and functional, but architecturally retain[ing] something of the flavor of Mobile or New Orleans.”

Harold Stirling Vanderbilt, a grandson of Maria Louisa Kissam Vanderbilt who was chairman of the university’s Board of Trust from 1955 until 1968, provided funding for air conditioning for four of the buildings, leaving the remaining two “ready for installation when needed.”

Completion of these dorms allowed the opening of Cole and Tolman halls to upperclass women, many of whom had been housed on 24th Avenue in older residences that “were expensive to operate and fire traps.” Branscomb’s “proper and desirable answer” to the “problem of housing women” was “an area for women across 24th Avenue.” (Branscomb Quadrangle, which opened in 1962, originally for the housing of women, was named for Chancellor Branscomb and his wife, Margaret, a year before his retirement.)

In his report to the Board of Trust, Branscomb also recommended that “old” Kissam Hall, along with the Fine Arts Building, be razed immediately.

“No doubt many a baseball will be tossed in the open green and the grass will be worn, but we shall have fresh air, and green lawns, and attractive buildings, and a campus growing speedily in symmetry and beauty,” Branscomb asserted. “Perhaps a continuation of the parking problem is not too much to pay for these values.”

Thanks to Harvie Branscomb, Alumni Lawn was created, furnishing an ideal space for student recreation, concerts and Commencement.

Now, monumental plans are being made for future generations of students with construction of phase two of College Halls at Vanderbilt on the site of Kissam Quadrangle (see sidebar).

The original Kissam Hall served its all-male residents for 57 years. The second Kissam Hall and Quadrangle will have served its residents, both male and female, for 55 years when the last student moves out in May 2012. And the grand old name of “Kissam” will be preserved with the two new residential colleges to be located on the same site that has witnessed thousands of students at work, at play and at rest on the corner of West End and 21st avenues.

Lyle Lankford is senior officer for university history and protocol at Vanderbilt.

Dr. Kyla Terhune walks briskly along the corridors of Vanderbilt University Medical Center, dashing between her last surgery of the day in the O.R. and her first afternoon patient in The Vanderbilt Clinic. With long curly hair pulled back in a ponytail, the tall, slender surgeon still wears her surgical scrubs.

“I like to wear street clothes when I see patients,” she says. Today, however, there’s been no time to change.

Time is of the essence in this busy physician’s life.

An assistant professor of surgery and anesthesiology, the mother of two also shepherds 290 first-year students as head of Hank Ingram House on The Martha Rivers Ingram Commons at Vanderbilt. Joining her in this living and learning community is her husband of 12 years, Richard “Rick” Keuler Jr.; their two children, Tate and Amelia; and their dog, Sackson.

“Hank’s House,” as it’s affectionately called, is the largest of the 10 houses on The Ingram Commons. Each is guided by a professor who lives with and mentors the resident students. Frank Wcislo, associate professor of history and European studies and dean of The Ingram Commons, says the living-learning experience helps first-year students successfully transition into life at the university by connecting them with each other and with upperclass undergraduates, graduate students, faculty, staff and administrators.

A beautiful cluster of classic buildings located in the southeastern part of campus adjacent to Peabody College, The Ingram Commons is phase one of Vanderbilt’s College Halls system. Construction is slated to begin on phase two, College Halls at Kissam, in May 2012 (see the Collective Memory article in this issue). When completed, Kissam’s two colleges will house about 660 upperclass students in four halls, led by two faculty directors-in-residence and four resident graduate fellows.

Dream Team

As the first physician in her family, Terhune values the chance to give students considering medical careers a reality check about the demands of balancing work and home life. Here she enjoys a moment catching up with her husband, Rick Keuler.

Terhune is the first new head of house to be appointed since The Ingram Commons opened in 2008, as well as the first physician to hold that position. Keuler is the first attorney to live there. While Terhune is officially in charge, it’s very much a team project.

“I absolutely would not be able to do it without Rick’s assistance, support and hard work,” she states.

Terhune’s schedule is challenging. Rising most mornings at 5:30, she walks across campus to the Medical Center to start her 12-hour day there: performing surgery, checking on post-op patients, seeing other patients in the clinic, educating medical students and residents, conducting research, and conferring with other attending physicians. After dinner with her family in The Commons Center dining room, she begins the second shift: meeting with the house advisory council and resident advisers (RAs), attending house events, informally counseling students, and spending time with her own children.

In addition to caring for their children, Keuler has a part-time solo law practice and does pro bono legal work in the community. He plans activities for the undergraduates, sends out many of the house notices, and also attends house meetings.

“We combine our strengths,” Terhune says. “Rick does a good job of organizing things, and he’s good at technology. And he’s just more fun.”

“I’m good with groups,” Keuler says, “but Kyla is better at interpersonal relationships.”

“They’re a dream team for us,” says Wcislo. “There’s a good match between their skill sets as a physician and an attorney and those needed to mentor 18-year-olds.”

Living the Dream

Born in Fayetteville, Ark., the 37-year-old Terhune came to her career in academic medicine somewhat later than most of her peers. She attended Princeton University, where she met her husband and graduated magna cum laude in 1996 with a degree in molecular biology.

“I always wanted to be a physician,” she says. “But I needed to work to make some money in order to attend medical school.”

Terhune’s children, Amelia and Tate, take living among 290 college students in stride. Terhune’s husband, attorney Rick Keuler, has been the children’s primary caregiver for most of their lives.

A native of New Jersey, Keuler received a bachelor’s degree in politics and teacher preparation from Princeton in 1996. From there he went to law school and also taught some classes at an inner-city high school in Washington, D.C. While he studied law at Georgetown University, Terhune taught chemistry and biology and lived in the dormitory at St. Andrew’s, a private boarding school in Middletown, Del. A state-champion tennis player and point guard in high school, Terhune also coached women’s tennis and basketball at St. Andrew’s.

As soon as Keuler earned his J.D. degree in 1999, the couple married and Terhune began medical studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She gave birth to their son, Tate, in 2003. The next year Terhune earned her M.D. degree and was admitted to Vanderbilt’s residency program. Keuler has been the children’s primary caregiver since 2004.

As a general surgeon, Terhune is a minority in her chosen profession. Although the number of women medical-school graduates has nearly doubled since 1979, and number of female surgical residents has almost quadrupled since 1970, women are still underrepresented in the academic surgical sciences. According to the Association of American Medical Colleges, women hold just 18 percent of surgical faculty positions in the U.S. today. At Vanderbilt the percentage is somewhat lower, with 17 women making up 12 percent of the 138 surgical faculty members.

Surgery, however, wasn’t Terhune’s initial career choice. “I thought I wanted to be a psychiatrist,” she says, “but when I really looked at it, surgery seemed a better fit for me. I enjoy working with my hands, and surgeons work on problems they can try to fix mechanically.”

She finished surgery and critical-care residencies at Vanderbilt in 2011 and became board-certified in both areas. During her residency, she also spent a year of research with her mentor, Dr. John Tarpley, BA’66, MD’70, professor of surgery.

“She’s an outstanding clinical surgeon, terrific with patients and their families, careful, and compulsive,” Tarpley says. “As a surgical educator you are either a judge or a coach. I call her a ‘playing coach.’ She coaches people to improve by breaking down difficult tasks into workable, solvable bits.”

Terhune has already won several teaching awards, including the 2010 Hillman Award presented by fourth-year students to the single resident or fellow whom they deem the best teacher. She also received the David C. Leach Award from the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education for developing the Intern Bootcamp, a two-day skills session for incoming surgery, anesthesia, medical and emergency medicine interns. In addition, she’s held skill sessions throughout the year, teaching interns such things as how best to communicate with patients, technical skills like suturing and knot tying, and mock emergency code simulations.

“I wanted to teach them the kinds of things I wish I’d been exposed to when I was an intern,” she says. “I still remember the gut-wrenching feeling of walking into the [surgical intensive care unit] that first day.”

That same desire to prepare students for their chosen professions motivated Terhune to take on head-of-house responsibilities on The Commons. “I thought I could make a contribution because many freshmen want to be premed. They see me leaving early in the morning and coming back late at night. I share what I can about my day with them, and we discuss it.”

As the first physician in her family, Terhune didn’t realize how the demands and pressures of a medical career would affect her and her family.

“Being a physician not only impacts my life but also that of my family,” she says. “Any time I’m on call, my husband is, too, because he’s the primary caregiver for our children. If students are going to commit to study medicine, they need to be aware of the implications of that decision.”

Creative Partnership

Terhune’s clinical and educational responsibilities at the Medical Center, her past experience teaching and coaching high school students, plus living in a house system at Princeton and St. Andrew’s, made her an ideal candidate for head of Hank’s House, says Dean Wcislo. Having a Princeton and Georgetown graduate, former Philadelphia lawyer and stay-at-home father sealed the deal.

Keuler also models an alternative vision of success for the students of Hank’s House through his role as stay-at-home father and community volunteer. “Knowing there are other definitions of ‘making it’ besides having a high-powered career helps to ground students when they encounter academic difficulties,” Wcislo says.

“They’ve been wonderful to work with,” says house president Tanner Floyd, a freshman from Clarksburg, W.Va. “Learning about their lives has been incredible and extremely educational. They’re a great resource because so many students are premed or prelaw.”

Although Hank’s House is the largest house on The Ingram Commons, Terhune and Keuler work hard to create a sense of community and inclusiveness for all residents. Every week they hold Friday Family Night at their apartment, where students enjoy chocolate chip cookies, snacks, soft drinks and games. They also invite faculty colleagues to share their professional and intellectual passions at house dinners. Recent guests have included Dr. Mark Denison, Craig–Weaver Chair in Pediatrics and a professor of pediatric infectious disease, who spoke with the students after they viewed the movie Contagion.

Another night the residents watched a documentary about sustainable agriculture, followed by dinner at Tayst, Nashville’s first “green”-certified restaurant. There they had a chance to discuss the future of food with owner and executive chef Jeremy Barlow, BA’95.

Hank’s House residents participate in service-learning activities, such as teaching science to students in neighborhood public schools. And they play hard, too, competing with the other houses in intramural sports and hosting informal mixers, movie nights and dances. Men and women live on different floors, and security is tight, requiring key passes to enter the building and travel between floors.

The couple has been very creative in establishing face-to-face relationships with every student, says Wcislo. He cites as an example how they communicated to the students the importance of civility in the house.

“They covered a large whiteboard with a lot of off-color language,” he remembers. “Then they added this sentence: ‘She lives here, too’—a reference to their 3-year-old daughter, Amelia, who was playing on the floor beneath the whiteboard. Many of the freshmen have younger brothers and sisters, so they got the message.”

Family Affair

Both Terhune and Keuler say the Commons living-learning experience is a positive one for the whole family. Their 8-year-old son, Tate, agrees. “I have lots of friends at Hank’s House,” he says proudly. “I see them everywhere.”

“In many ways it’s our preferred way to live,” Terhune says. “It’s intellectually and emotionally stimulating. It’s great to be able to change my train of thought as I walk back across campus from the hospital: I use a part of my brain that I don’t always use, having conversations I wouldn’t otherwise have.”

Keuler appreciates the opportunity to make an impact on the students. “The transition from high school to college wasn’t easy for me at times,” he says. “I want to be able to help Vanderbilt students who also might be having a difficult time making that transition.”

“Surprisingly, the students don’t interfere with my sleep,” says Terhune. “Our apartment is very quiet, and we aren’t awakened to deal with emergencies, unless they are life-threatening. The RAs take care of health and discipline issues through the dean of students, and the students know my patients come first.”

“It’s been really good,” Keuler says of the whole experience. “The energy and enthusiasm of the students is exciting—and tiring.”

If there’s a downside to living where you work, Keuler says, it’s the lack of privacy. Another drawback is having little time together as a couple, says Terhune.

“But we enjoy so much what we’re doing at Hank’s House,” she continues, “that we think of it as our time together.”

Engineering professor Sankaran Mahadevan and his colleagues develop computer models that can predict whether complex structures and systems will fail, when failure is likely to occur, and how to prevent such failure.

When you take a plane trip, drive across a bridge, or ride the commuter train to work, you trust that those structures and systems are safe. Likewise, pilots flying combat missions depend on their planes, and astronauts hurtling into space depend on the rockets propelling them.

Sankaran Mahadevan, the John R. Murray Sr. Chair in Engineering, works on ways to increase reliability and decrease risks of those and other complex structures and systems. His research regarding railroad wheels, spacecraft, dams, bridges, and even nuclear waste dumps has the potential to save human lives and millions of dollars.

Mahadevan and his colleagues in the Structural Reliability Research Group are developing computer models that can predict with a high degree of confidence whether a system will fail, when failure is likely to occur, and how to prevent such failure.

“Skyscrapers and bridges can’t be put through full-scale testing as can small mechanical and electrical devices,” says Mahadevan, who is a professor of civil, environmental and mechanical engineering. “You can’t test the reliability of large systems like space shuttles and warplanes by waiting to see what fails. No matter what the system, we have to be concerned about how reliable it is.”

Mahadevan also directs Vanderbilt’s Reliability and Risk Engineering and Management doctoral program, the largest and most prestigious of its kind in the world.

Today the program is self-sustaining, with governmental and private partners that include the Transportation Technology Center, Sandia National Laboratories, Federal Aviation Administration, NASA, U.S. Air Force, U.S. Department of Energy, Boeing Co., Bell Helicopter Textron and Union Pacific Corp.

Mahadevan is currently applying his expertise to NASA spacecraft. His team is working on calculating risk and uncertainty in such large systems by incorporating multiple disciplines like structures, aerodynamics, propulsion, mass and geometry into the computer programs. An acceptable risk for spacecraft is typically about one in 10,000.

“The question then becomes, ‘How good are our models?’” Mahadevan says, noting that many assumptions and very little data exist on which to base such predictions.

Mahadevan’s reliability methods can be used in the design, manufacture, operation and maintenance of equipment and systems in many fields. His research for the Federal Highway Administration, for example, identified which 2,000 bridges throughout the country should carry advanced structural health monitoring instrumentation. The team also developed a cost-effective way to inspect train wheels that demonstrated a 400 percent return on investment for partner Union Pacific.

Current research includes a U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory project to develop rapid systems health diagnosis and prognosis for warplanes. The group also is working on applying risk and reliability management to large complex systems like homeland security and transportation. Through a consortium of universities known as the CRESP project, the U.S. Department of Energy funds an effort to model the durability and uncertainty of concrete storage facilities for low-level nuclear waste. The team also has received a five-year, $1.2 million award from the FAA to develop advanced methods to predict fatigue and fracture—and their related uncertainty—in helicopter rotor components.

If we want results, says Christopher Slobogin, the Milton Underwood Professor of Law at Vanderbilt, we should reform the system dramatically to stress community-based treatment over incarceration.

“The bottom line is, the research shows that if you’re interested in reducing recidivism, community-based treatment is far and away the best way to go,” Slobogin says. “That means fewer prisons, less incarceration, and more diversion to the community.”

Slobogin

Slobogin is co-author of the 2011 book Juveniles at Risk: A Plea for Preventive Justice with Mark R. Fondacaro, professor of psychology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York. The book, published by Oxford University Press, proposes some radical-sounding ideas, among them that juvenile offenders should never be tried as adults or transferred to adult prisons. Incarceration of juveniles in general should only be a last-resort measure, Slobogin argues.

“We know it’s important to many people to make sure criminals receive the punishment they deserve, regardless of whether those criminals are dangerous,” says Slobogin. “But polls show that people care as much about public safety as they do about vengeance.”

Community-based treatment programs are far more effective than incarceration in reducing even violent future criminal behavior, he says, because they can take better aim at the family, peer, school and neighborhood risk factors that contribute to delinquent behavior.

Slobogin also notes that neurological research shows teenagers have undeveloped brains and less control of their impulses than adults. In some cases, society can simply “wait out” a juvenile criminal while he or she is being held in a juvenile facility until his or her brain matures.

The worst-case scenario happens when a juvenile commits a crime, is transferred to adult court, and is sentenced as an adult to an adult prison. The person who is eventually released from that system is sharply more likely to commit additional crimes than someone who was released back into the community and received treatment, says Slobogin.

“If juveniles are put in adult prisons, their developmental role models will be adult criminals, which is just about the worst possible way to handle the situation.”

Provost Richard McCarty talks with first-year students and parents during move-in day

Thanks to the generosity of more than 1,300 donors, Opportunity Vanderbilt has exceeded its initial goal and raised $108.4 million, as of June 30, 2011. Never has our university placed a more urgent need before our alumni, parents and friends, and we have been overwhelmed by their response.

Today only Vanderbilt and five other major research universities (Harvard, Penn, Princeton, Stanford and Yale) are 100 percent need-blind in the admissions process, meet full demonstrated need for all students, meet that need without including need-based loans in the package, and have no income cutoffs or other limiting factors.

Eliminating student need-based loans from undergraduate financial aid packages has long been a vision of Chancellor Nicholas S. Zeppos. This achievement was the final step after years of fighting to reduce undergraduate student indebtedness at Vanderbilt. During his time as provost from 2002 to 2008, Zeppos devoted considerable effort to this problem, and each year we were able to enhance funding for scholarships and grants in support of our undergraduates with demonstrated financial need. As recently as the late 1990s, our university was one of the national leaders in debt burden of its graduating seniors—an unfortunate distinction. In 2008, as we prepared for the public announcement of our new expanded aid program, the subprime mortgage crisis created a global financial meltdown that continues to impact us. As a grim reminder, on Sept. 29, 2008, the Dow Jones Industrial Average had its largest one-day drop ever: 778 points. The financial markets notwithstanding, Vanderbilt’s Board of Trust affirmed its commitment, and Chancellor Zeppos announced that Vanderbilt University would eliminate need-based loans from offers of financial aid for all undergraduates, beginning in fall 2009.

As I look back on the events of three years ago, I am reminded that leadership matters. Much of what we do on campus reflects our belief that a Vanderbilt education should be accessible to all eligible students regardless of family finances. Chancellor Zeppos and the Board of Trust were being true to a core principle of our university, despite the economic calamity that was taking shape around us.

Our goal was a challenging one: Create a dedicated endowment of $100 million to support our undergraduates with demonstrated financial need. This fundraising initiative, called Opportunity Vanderbilt, received a major boost in late 2008 with an anonymous gift of $20 million. This transformative gift marked a critical turning point in our fundraising efforts during the darkest time of the global recession, and we will be forever grateful for this remarkably generous support.

The case for this support has been made in a compelling way by our talented campaign leaders, Board of Trust members, undergraduate school deans and senior leadership, including Chancellor Zeppos. What an amazing collaboration to propel our university into the 21st century!

However, we are far from securing the endowment necessary to support the full financial aid needs of our talented undergraduates. More than 60 percent of Vanderbilt students receive some type of financial aid. Approximately 47 percent of our 6,800 undergraduates received some level of need-based financial aid last year, and 26 percent of the total cost was supported by existing endowment funds while 68 percent was covered from our operating budget. The situation is dramatically different at one of our peer institutions, Princeton University, where less than 20 percent of need-based financial aid comes from operating funds. Closing this gap in endowment coverage at Vanderbilt is a top priority, and we will continue to enlist the support of our alumni, parents and friends in this ambitious endeavor.

The demand for a Vanderbilt education is at an all-time high, and the Class of 2015 is our most talented ever. As provost, I am fortunate to see the impact of Opportunity Vanderbilt—in the lives of our students, in their engagement with our faculty, and in their outreach to society.

Access to a world-class education is the embodiment of the American dream, and I am proud to see it unfold on our campus. With your continued help, Opportunity Vanderbilt can ensure that the most talented students can continue to attend Vanderbilt and go on to transform our society.

Richard McCarty, Vanderbilt’s provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs since 2008, previously served seven years as dean of the College of Arts and Science.

John Stein, BA’73 (left), and Dr. Jeff Balser, vice chancellor for health affairs and dean of the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, sign the beam with patient Dalton Waggoner.

The Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt officially launched a $30 million expansion project April 7 with a beam-signing celebration. Friends, donors, patients and Medical Center leadership added their signatures to a 14-foot, bright yellow beam that will become part of the permanent structure for the 33-bed, 30,000-square-foot, first-phase addition. Construction will include a five-story addition to the hospital’s northwest corner. Also included will be a new third-floor surgical preoperative and recovery area, as well as added space for pediatric clinics.

Victor Anderson, Oberlin Theological School Chair; Margaret M. Blair, Milton R. Underwood Chair in Free Enterprise; Dr. John W. Brock III, Monroe Carell Jr. Chair; William P. Caferro, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in History; Dr. Dai H. Chung, Janie Robinson and John Moore Lee Chair in Pediatrics; Dr. Ellen Wright Clayton, Craig-Weaver Chair in Pediatrics; Roger D. Cone, Joe C. Davis Chair in Biomedical Science; Dr. Michael R. DeBaun, J.C. Peterson, M.D., Chair in Pediatric Pulmonology;

Dr. Kathryn M. Edwards, Sarah H. Sell and Cornelius Vanderbilt Chair; Lynn Enterline, Nancy Perot Mulford Chair in English; Yanqin Fan, Centennial Chair in Economics; Kathleen L. Gould, Louise B. McGavock Chair; Jonathan L. Haines, Louise B. McGavock Chair; Dr. David G. Harrison, Betty and Jack Bailey Chair in Cardiology; Dr. Jacek J. Hawiger, Louise B. McGavock Chair; Steven D. Hollon, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in Psychology; Carl H. Johnson, Stevenson Chair in Biological Sciences; Owen D. Jones, New York Alumni Chancellor’s Chair in Law;

Michael P. Kreyling, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in English; Jane G. Landers, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in History; Tong Li, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in Economics; William Luis, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in Spanish; Dr. Mark A. Magnuson, Louise B. McGavock Chair; Dr. Randolph A. Miller, Cornelius Vanderbilt Chair; Dr. Karoly Mirnics, James G. Blakemore Chair in Psychiatry; James G. Patton, Stevenson Chair in Biological Sciences;

Dr. L. Jackson Roberts II, William Stokes Chair in Experimental Therapeutics; Sandra J. Rosenthal, Jack and Pamela Egan Chair in Chemistry; Mitchell A. Seligson, Centennial Chair in Political Science; David H. Wasserman, Annie Mary Lyle Chair; John A. Weymark, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in Economics; David C. Wood, W. Alton Jones Chair in Philosophy; Christopher V. Wright, Louise B. McGavock Chair; and Dr. Mary M. Zutter, Louise B. McGavock Chair.

Daughter’s Gift Still Changing Lives

Louise B. McGavock never attended Vanderbilt, but her impact on the institution still resonates nearly 50 years after her death in 1965. The prominent Nashville philanthropist and social leader left her trust, including her family’s historic Two Rivers Mansion, to Vanderbilt University, eventually making it possible for the university to establish eight faculty chairs in the School of Medicine. Three of the new endowed chairs announced earlier this year stem from her generosity.

Mrs. McGavock’s gift to Vanderbilt was made in recognition of the care that her father, William Bransford, had received at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. She made a gift in his name in 1956 to expand and renovate the hematology laboratory. Through the years, careful stewardship of her estate has allowed Louise McGavock’s gifts to continue to sustain Vanderbilt and to accomplish more than she ever could have envisioned.

Chairs of the 2010–11 Senior Class Fund student committee present a banner, signed by members of the Class of 2011, to Chancellor Nicholas Zeppos on Senior Day. From left to right are co-chairs Patrick Seamens, BA’11; Aysha Malik, BS’11; Eric Walk, BE’11; and Kate Foster, BS’11, and campaign chair Zach Pfinsgraff, BA’10.

“We are very proud of this year’s results and believe it’s a reflection of the tremendous experience we shared during our four years at Vanderbilt,” says Zach Pfinsgraff, BA’10, who chaired the effort last year, leading a committee of nearly 50 seniors who helped coordinate the group’s activities.

The Senior Class Fund is a collection of individual gifts from each graduating class. It functions as a student group on campus, led by an overall campaign chair and four co-chairs—all members of the senior class—who execute outreach and informational activities to educate their peers about the importance of giving. The focus is on individual and personal gifts, with those funds going toward the area of the university chosen by each senior.

Gifts from the Class of 2011 collectively totaled nearly $21,500 and will impact programs and organizations across the entire campus. The Senior Class Fund committee is advised by staff members of Vanderbilt’s Development and Alumni Relations Office.

“We rallied around the idea of giving back to the schools, student organizations and causes on campus that made the biggest impact on us—ensuring future generations of students will continue to enjoy and build upon what we left behind,” says Pfinsgraff.

“It is exciting to see how the Senior Class Fund has picked up momentum year after year. I believe more students and young alumni are embracing the concept of a lifelong relationship with Vanderbilt. Continued participation is key, and I challenge and anticipate the Class of 2012 to set a new participation record next year!”

I hadn’t slept much the night before, or the night before that, for that matter. Although I was utterly exhausted, I knew that sleep would not come now, either—even in a comfortable bed in a relatively dark and quiet dormitory room at the Nashville university where I was enrolled as an undergraduate student.

I had just returned from a disquieting walk around my university’s campus with a member of the administration. As I eyed the sidewalk, he wrapped his arm around my shoulder as a father might a son whom he’s part proud of, part disappointed in. “We are so glad that y’all want to raise this awareness for the homeless,” he said. “But I really don’t think a protest at city hall is a very good idea.”

Two nights earlier, my best friend (now my wife) and I had sat across from the administrator in the university’s student center while he criticized at length our decision to organize a large-scale letter-writing campaign and demonstration to encourage Nashville’s mayor to follow through on his plan to build 2,000 units of low-income housing for the city’s homeless population, a plan which was—both then and now—embarrassingly underdeveloped.

In retrospect, I can’t blame him for his frustration. Part of an administrator’s job, after all, is to ensure that an institution’s order and reputation remain intact. But the edifice of order came crumbling down when, earlier that day, he had received a call from a friend in the mayor’s office who asked him, apparently with great displeasure, why in God’s name his students were planning to disturb the peace with such nonsense.

As it turns out, power does not appreciate a challenge—especially when marginalized people have anything to do with it.

Lying on my back in the dark, I didn’t recognize the number on my cellphone, but I knew I’d better answer, especially during a week such as this one. “Hello, is this Mr. Krinks?” the voice asked. I answered that it was. “This is Lt. Hawkins of the Nashville Central Precinct.”

My heart skipped and nearly stopped as it dropped into my stomach. The lieutenant notified me that groups of more than 20 people intending to conduct a march through downtown must request permission from the city four days ahead of the event. But we were already three days out, which meant that a march would result in arrest. He asked if I understood this.

Shaken, caught off guard, and without a chance to think it through, I answered that I did. Bearing a weight in the center of my chest I had not known before, I spent the remainder of the week staying up late into the night with my friends and co-organizers, planning, re-planning, praying, and trembling before a spirit and a movement far more awe-inspiring than anything we could have dreamed up on our own.

A friend once said that there are at least two kinds of social movements in the world: the kind you sit down and start from scratch, and the kind that comes like a river to sweep you away. I found myself advocating for Nashville’s homeless community as a 20-year-old college student not because I possessed any sort of unique virtue, but because, faced with the reality of thousands of people spending night after night without shelter in my own backyard—people who, as I was beginning to understand, bore the very image of God in the lines of their faces—I had no other option.

Part willing, part eager and perhaps part foolish, I let the river guide me, and before I could think twice, I was standing with more than 100 other students and faculty before our city’s seat of power trying, as best I knew how at the time, to proclaim some fragment of good news to those who bear the burden of homelessness in our city.

Four years later I am still trying to echo, as concretely as possible, the words that Jesus of Nazareth proclaimed to the crowd in his inaugural sermon: good news to the poor, release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, and freedom for the oppressed. Indeed, I will only ever be trying to echo and embody this proclamation. I am, as I have come to understand it, a laborer in a vineyard not my own. Grand outcomes and solutions are good and fine, but they’ll only ever matter if I’m willing to get my hands dirty.

Andrew Krinks reads from the Bible during the 2009 Citywide Stations of the Cross, a spiritual pilgrimage held during Holy Week with an emphasis on Nashville’s homeless and impoverished.

And being willing to get my hands dirty means being willing to relinquish my own comfort, well being and security for the sake of others. For what good is good news to the poor if the one giving it isn’t willing to get close enough to look that person in the eye and to be affected by what one sees there? Perhaps this is part of what it means to restore sight to the blind, for maybe it is I who am blind, unable to see in a woman asking for help on the sidewalk a sister, a friend—or even God. Indeed, perhaps it is I who am in need of good news and liberation.

If I have learned anything about serving and advocating for those who are marginalized, it is that my efforts are of no use if I am not willing to become vulnerable to the suffering endured by those who live and die on the margins of society. To become vulnerable, as I understand it, is to refuse the temptation to exercise a domineering sort of power over those I seek to serve. It is to refuse the distance that would protect me from getting over-involved in a stranger’s complicated poverty. It is to refuse the security that would hedge me in against the risks that come with challenging or seeking to change a broken system.

Indeed, even more than these things, to become vulnerable is to become willing to experience all manner of reversal. Shifting places from speaker to listener, from host to guest, from liberator to liberated—this is what it means to serve the poor, the outcast and the marginalized. For marginalization and poverty have to do with far more than a simple lack of financial stability. To be marginalized is to be invisible, unheard and unknown.

Therefore, what the homeless man asking for money on a downtown sidewalk needs, just as much as he needs money, is for his face to be seen in close proximity, his voice and story to be heard in conversation, and his name to be spoken aloud in the presence of another. Only then can the other symptoms of poverty begin to be addressed and alleviated.

With these things in mind, on my good days, I seek to spend my energy on behalf of those who suffer beneath the weight of poverty and marginalization. To make visible those who are invisible, to amplify the voices of those who are perpetually silenced, to speak the names of those who are otherwise unknown—if there is a vocation for me to enter more fully in the years to come, I pray that this be it.

When my wife and I taught creative writing and poetry to homeless men at Room in the Inn’s Campus for Human Development, and later to women at the Tennessee Prison for Women, we did our best to lend a language typically reserved for institutions of higher learning and publishing to people normally too busy trying to survive or stay sane to think about things like metaphor, meter or rhyme. But because poetry is the language of depths, it can also function as a lifeline, a new way of seeing and being in the world that is indispensible for people who daily endure the deafening and debilitating silence of society’s margins.

As we have entered into relationship with people journeying from homelessness to housing, healing and community, time and time again, just when we thought we were the ones serving, the tables have been turned. From the night we spent with fellow Holy Week observers beneath an enormous tarp-canopy in the woods a few hundred yards from the Cumberland River as the recipients of hospitality from a homeless couple and their injured friend, to the spontaneous Christmas gifts, calls, and late-night car repairswe have received from people we thought we were helping with housing and resources, we have witnessed reversals that keep us mindful of our common humanity with people who, as it turns out, are not so different from us.

Today, as editor of The Contributor, Nashville’s street newspaper about homelessness and poverty, which is sold by approximately 400 homeless and formerly homeless men and women, I have the opportunity to help make visible and approachable—on countless street corners across the city—men and women who would otherwise go unknown by the rest of the community. As a form of dignified employment, The Contributor helps provide the means necessary for hundreds of men and women to find financial stability and often housing.

Working with homeless, formerly homeless and nonhomeless writers, I am blessed to be able to help publish and distribute a newspaper that makes poverty and homelessness a larger part of our city’s conversation—all while providing work and fostering community across class lines.

And finally, as a student at Vanderbilt Divinity School, where I recently helped draft an official statement on poverty to be included in the school’s statement of its commitments, I have had the opportunity to take part in deep, engaging and constructive conversations about how to make the alleviation of poverty a greater priority within our various faith communities. For whether one is a Christian, a Jew, a Muslim, a Hindu, a Buddhist or otherwise, the call to care for the poor, the stranger and the outcast is part and parcel of what it means to be a person of faith.

As a person of faith myself, I believe humans are made for community. Or, as South Africans in the fight against apartheid put it, “I am because we are.” But as nice as it might look on paper, the wounds of poverty and marginalization, individual and structural alike, will not be healed until more of us live as though such an idea were actually true. And thanks be to God, as the last four years of my life have made unmistakably clear, it is.

With six whole weeks’ undergraduate experience under our belts and hardly a care in the world, our demeanor and complete lack of purpose must have contrasted with those student groups that felt genuine—unlike our feigned—entitlement to an open-forum discussion with the chancellor during the tumultuous 1960s. Many late boomers like I was knew that time of campus unrest mostly through its depiction in Mad Magazine.

That day we two “activists” had no agenda, no grievances, no demands. Essentially, we just wanted to say hello. That probably would have been enough to gain entry, had Chancellor Heard been there. But that day it fell upon his skilled secretary to endure the fictitious reason for our stop.

“What would you like to discuss with the chancellor?” she inquired with a disarming smile, after obtaining our names. We struggled to come up with something befitting the surroundings and stature of our would-be host. “Certain concerns we have,” “the quality of life here,” “first-year questions,” something along those lines, spilled from our lips.

Complimented, nay, thrilled, merely by the fact that this nice lady had actually taken down our names, we ventured on to lunch and then about our business. Soon we’d forgotten about it.

A week or two had passed when engraved invitations arrived from the Office of the Chancellor. “You Are Cordially Invited,” it began beneath the university crest, “to Dine with Chancellor Alexander Heard at Twelve Noon in the Office of the Chancellor on” whatever date it was in the fall of 1976.

As many can attest, accessibility was never an issue with Chancellor Heard. There were the open forum events, an always-open door and, of course, the freshman picnics at the Heards’ home during orientation.
And now there was this wonderful lunch, an almost familial gathering attended by four or five people in the chancellor’s suite: Chancellor Heard, Vice Chancellor Rob Roy Purdy, Gaines, me, and one or two from the English department. Daunting though the occasion was, most of my anxiety sprang from fear that the subject of my grades would come up somehow. (It didn’t, thankfully.)

So I relished the moment while consuming our soup and sandwiches and ice cream with great purpose. Would that I had thought to ask questions that occurred to me later: What were the ’60s like here? Is that Fels guy teaching me economics really the same one who wrote the casebook? Did you ever talk politics with Robert Penn Warren? Or grades with my instructors? No, not that! But perhaps this question: What problems loom ahead for my generation, do you suppose?

That question was never asked, but Chancellor Heard asked and answered it rhetorically years later when, in delivering his next-to-last commencement address, he entreated our class to mind the world’s shortage of water. A commencement address about lack of water? What about the importance of setting goals in life, about leaving the world better for those who follow you, erudition for its own sake, living a virtuous life, Excelsior, and all the other tried-and-true commencement themes? But a lack of water in the world? Although doubtlessly researched, indeed, prescient, it was not the expected call to arms. Nor would I have remembered it, frankly, but for having to confront that very issue in Quyarrah Province, Iraq, almost 30 years later.

“Just think of this as an adventure,” my friend Maj. Charles Clark had recommended as we loaded gear and soldiers onto buses at Camp Shelby on a hot South Mississippi day in June 2009, on our way to an airport.

An adventure it was! The summer of 2009 witnessed entry of our brigade into Northern Iraq and a dust storm that The New York Times described as being “of biblical proportions.” The heat, already overwhelming, was blanketed by an immense cloud the size, they say, of Turkey.

The cloud passed after several days, but not without adding to the stultifying heat and, with that, greater evaporation of precious water. Our lifeline there at Q-West Contingency Operating Base was an unelevated pipeline from the Tigris stretching over many miles. Soon the two open basins where we stored our water became just one, and then that one became quite low.

The climate was not the only culprit. Iraqi tribesmen, no less in need of water, hacked into the pipeline repeatedly. We’d fix it; they’d hack somewhere else. On it went, until a deal emerged one day, without bloodshed. We’d give them some water; they’d leave our pipeline alone and help us protect it from others.

I wrote home, recalling in an email to my family Chancellor Heard’s words to us that day back in 1981 on Curry Field, how among the Great Challenges for our generation would be to determine how to distribute and allocate an increasingly scarce supply of water, disappearing in some places and abundant in others.

Father and son, attorneys Frank and Brian Montague, at the elder Montague’s law office. Frank Montague has relied on crutches since contracting polio at age 28. “He is succumbing orthopedically—but in no other sense,” Brian says.

Fast forward. While we negotiated with those tribesmen, two hours north in Mosul—my other home in Iraq—water was abundant. Trucks drove the roads there at Diamondback and Marez daily, spraying water on the roads to suppress the dust! As I traveled back and forth between those two places fulfilling duties as a JAG officer for two maneuver battalions, the story about the water-spraying truck was one I kept to myself.

There are other stories from Iraq—celebratory, tragic, banal—all either beyond the telling here or best kept off these pages. It’s been more than a year since my more recent adventure, the one in Northern Iraq. If conditions there were sometimes challenging, the return was no less so.

My law practice, which had closed twice in five years amid two military active-duty interruptions, would not spring back this time with the elasticity it had five years earlier. It was something to do with the economy and the understandable disaffection of some clients for my comings and goings, I believe.

Then I received a call from my chain of command after being back a couple of months, their first contact with me. They asked me to relinquish the one O6 JAG position in the Mississippi National Guard so that another could have a turn, resulting for me in loss of commission, health insurance, and the part-time pay.

Whining to a local attorney about such challenges, maybe in search of perspective, yielded instant and unexpected clarity. “How’s your father?” he asked.

To understand the intended effect, you need to know about my father. He ran cross country, was a stellar athlete, and was working as a field engineer for Phillips Petroleum in Texas when, at age 28 and just months before the Salk vaccine became commercially available, he contracted polio. With loss of all leg muscles, he has walked on crutches since. He will be 86 soon. From using his arms for mobility during a lifetime, he is succumbing orthopedically—but in no other sense.

Lawyers, not a group of people hailed for their quickness to compliment, will tell you how he is a giant in the legal profession—tenacious and knowledgeable. He is revered for traits not unlike those John Poindexter described in speaking of Chancellor Heard: “He always spoke in his dignified Southern way. He was courteous, considerate, formal … courageous under attack, steely in resolution … calm under pressure, and demanding but not overbearing.”

There is this image I have of my father: passing the football to his three sons from a hill in our side yard, crutches laying by his side, sitting on a canvas-over-metal-frame folding seat he would use for hunting.

So when my colleague asked me how my father was, all complaints about the difficulty of acclimating and adapting to change evaporated like the summer waters of the Tigris.

I am building a law office now, and I soldier on, empowered by the example of men like Chancellor Heard and my father, and inspired by William Alexander Percy’s closing words in Lanterns on the Levee:

“Here among the graves in the twilight I see one thing only, but I see that thing clear. I see the long wall of a rampart sombre with sunset, a dusty road at its base. On the tower of the rampart stand the glorious high gods, Death and the rest, insolent and watching. Below on the road stream the tribes of men, tired, bent, hurt, and stumbling, and each man alone. As one comes beneath the tower, the High God descends and faces the wayfarer. He speaks three slow words: ‘Who are you?’ The pilgrim I know should be able to straighten his shoulders, to stand his tallest, and to answer defiantly, ‘I am your son.’”

When Kathy Hutson came to Big Stone Gap, Va., in the 1960s, she had no peers to help her sort out the parameters of developing and running a school speech therapy program.

That summer followed forced school integration in Virginia, and there was still turmoil and anger in the community. Jobs seemed scarce for either race, and I saw the dead-end spirit in too many homes. The experience made a deep impression on me, leaving me energized and challenged. It was the summer that my life turned around. My experience sensitized me to racial tension, and upon returning to my home in South Bend, Ind., I joined with others from my hometown to attend the 1963 march on Washington and heard Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech.

I liked English and philosophy and biology, but I was chomping at the bit to begin my life and work. I thought I would work with children with disabilities and was interested in social work, but the degree was a six-year master’s program. Speech therapy at that time was only four years, and because I did not think I could last for six years, it became my major.

During my last year of undergraduate school, I seriously considered becoming a sister. I had visited Glenmary houses in Detroit, Cincinnati, Chicago and Milwaukee during vacations and liked what I saw. However, it was not to be. My application was refused.

I really had not pursued other options because I was determined to join the sisters. Hurt and confused, I called my friend Sis. Monica in Big Stone. She invited me to come. I could live at Holy Cross, the convent where I had stayed two summers earlier.

If I had realized the improbabilities of getting a job, I might not have driven the 500 miles to look for work. I went to a private psychiatrist’s clinic because Monica had heard the clinic psychiatrist speak about special education needs. The clinic social worker who spoke with me assured me that the public schools were neither willing to hire me nor ready for my services; however, he directed me to the courthouse where the school administrative offices were housed.

The superintendent of more than 10,000 schoolchildren in Wise County, Mr. W.D. Richmon had his office in an 8-by-8-foot closet. He asked me what speech therapists did and how many schools I could serve. I said three, and he said four: East Stone Gap, Big Stone Gap, Appalachia and Wise. He also said that if I wanted the job, I could return the next morning when the school board met. If I could talk them into it, I could have the job.

After all was said and done, I got the job—I think my starting salary was $2,800 a year. This was my first job in my field, and I did not have a supervisor or peers to help sort out the parameters of developing and running a school speech program.

Many days I visited the children in their homes after school. I enjoyed the back roads, the trees, mountains and creeks, the homes, animals and gardens. I saw my first pileated woodpecker and a hillside of trillium and other wildflowers, waterfalls, and men plowing with horses.

I showed the families what they could do to help the children with their speech. Some lived back behind strip-mining operations, and their wells no longer produced good drinking water. Several had asthma and lived near a dump that burned day and night. Usually, the families were hospitable, and I often ate with them.

I also served middle-class and town children. Generally, I did not visit in their homes, as their parents usually came to school when I invited them. In the four elementary schools where I worked, none had space for any special services. At Wise Elementary I worked in a hall outside the seventh grade. At Appalachia Elementary I shared a small room with the mimeograph machine as well as a cot for sick children. At East Stone Gap, where many children depended on the school for shoes and clothing, I worked in the old clothing room.

During my first three years, I completed a survey of the region and found that at least 20 counties around me did not have speech services. Once I went to see the only other person who seemed to be offering those services in our rural mountainous area. I drove several hours to Hazard, Ky., and spent the night with him and his family. We complained and sympathized, but we never saw each other again. He was from New York and returned there the next year. The short paper I wrote about my survey helped me understand that I could never begin to do the major work required without more education and status.

By then I was tired, and doubts about myself and my future bogged me down so much that when I applied to graduate schools, the effort was as much about finding a new life as improving my skills and knowledge. I was accepted to three schools, but chose Vanderbilt—only a six-hour trip from Big Stone Gap. I chose the Bill Wilkerson Speech and Hearing Clinic at Vanderbilt because it had instituted several programs with both rural and urban low-income children. I had heard Kay Horton (BA’51, MS’53) from the clinic speak, and I was attracted to her vision and wanted to work with her and the children she served.

School was fairly easy after the work, volunteer programs, mental juggling and stress in the mountains: just reading and working in the clinic. I took some classes at Peabody College across the street, where I was exposed to research in behavior modification and the teaching of speech to children with severe disabilities, using their model. I also worked in an excellent hearing clinic with Ann Sitton, BA’60, MS’61, a pediatric audiologist.

I remained at Vanderbilt a year after my coursework ended, but the city and the big institution were never home. Back in southwestern Virginia an educational cooperative was being formed named DILENOWISCO (short for Dickenson, Lee, Norton City, Wise and Scott counties). A primary early goal of this cooperative was the initiation of new school programs, including some for disabled individuals. When I was offered a job as a speech therapist, I took it.

I put 100,000 miles on each of the two cars I owned during my eight years with the cooperative. In 1971, I took the American Speech and Hearing Association’s exam and became a full member of their association, earning a Certificate of Clinical Competence, which completed my formal education as a speech pathologist.

During these same years I became involved with children with hearing loss. There were no ear, nose and throat doctors in the region. I saw many cases of draining ears. Because it was a common condition that usually improved with time, many people accepted it as just another childhood ailment, not worth the time and money required for treatment—a discouragement to me because infected ears can lead to hearing loss, meningitis and long-term illness.

We applied for and received a federal grant to work with the hearing impaired. Within a year we hired three teachers, a social worker and an audiologist.

Through a local community college, I started teaching sign language when no one else could be found. I could teach vocabulary and finger spelling, although my receptive sign skills continued to be inadequate. On one occasion I was trying to interpret in order to include a hearing person in a conversation with a deaf woman. We were discussing someone who had moved out of the area. I asked why this person had moved in with another man, knowing she had just left a difficult marriage. As usual, I didn’t get the message, so I requested a repeat of the finger spelling. As my deaf friend repeated—not once but several times—I began reading the finger-spelled letters and saying them aloud, but still not putting them together. S … E … X … S … E … X. In disgust, our mutual friend, who did not know a word of sign language, yelled, “Sex! Sex!”

Many years later, as I write this toward the end of my career, I am a part-time speech pathologist with Wise County schools. It’s my 45th year in the system. Although I retired in 1999, I still work two or three days a week. Many of the dreams and visions that pulled us into the struggle have been fulfilled, inspiring new hope.

Life is still really interesting to me, but I am much slower and work is harder. I look forward to a quieter life, but I hope it’s with a richness of wisdom and with more time to reflect and be with friends as we look for meaning even in our declining bodies.

This essay has been adapted with permission from Kathy Hutson’s memoir, My Adult Life in Far Southwest Virginia.

Junior linebacker Archibald Barnes makes working out in 90-degree heat look easy during an early August football practice. For schedules, tickets for Vanderbilt’s first season under Head Football Coach James Franklin, and more, go to http://vucommodores.cstv.com.

Photo by John Russell.

Professor Oswald T. Avery in his laboratory in the current Medical Center North. The photograph, probably dating to 1948, is inscribed to his associate, Dr. Bertram Sprofkin.

Two of the most influential scientists of the 20th century, and perhaps of all time, have worked at Vanderbilt. One performed his last research study in a laboratory at Vanderbilt Hospital; the other, a physicist who began his career in Buttrick Hall, became one of the foremost pioneers in molecular biology and won the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine. Together, albeit independently, they revolutionized our understanding of genetics.

The first, Oswald Theodore Avery, discovered the nature of the most important substance in living organisms while working at the Rockefeller Institute. Although only a few people recognize Avery’s name—and fewer still know his later connection with Vanderbilt—the revolution Avery began is Darwinian in scope. The substance whose significance he discovered is deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA.

The experimental model used by Avery to study DNA had been described in 1928 by a British public health officer named Frederick Griffith. The significance of Griffith’s work was recognized by so few people that Avery’s laboratory probably was the only one studying DNA by this technique in the 1930s and 1940s.

Avery did not publish anything about the subject of DNA from 1933 to 1944, and his DNA paper appeared at the end of his career, just before retirement. Its conclusion that DNA was the genetic material in Griffith’s model, and presumably in other living things, was not accepted—in fact, it was bitterly opposed for eight years. Today this paper is generally recognized as the key to our understanding of evolution and how living things are made and work.

Avery studied the change in form and biological behavior inducible in pneumococci, a common and often lethal cause of bacterial pneumonia. Bacteria, like horses and men, breed true, and strains ordinarily do not change in appearance or in ability to produce disease. Griffith, by accident, discovered that avirulent bacteria injected into mice could be changed to virulent forms by adding heat-killed extracts of virulent bacteria. This process was called “transformation,” and the substance responsible was called “the transforming principle.”

The changes induced in the bacteria were stable, passed from generation to generation, and the reason ultimately was shown by Avery and colleagues to be assimilation of DNA from the virulent strain by the avirulent strain.

The major problems in this research program were technical (working with large amounts of virulent bacteria in a pre-antibiotic era), procedural (establishing that only DNA was present in the transforming material), and conceptual (no one believed the heritable material could be carbohydrate-rich DNA, as all essential materials were believed at the time to be proteins).

Working during an 11-year period with two associates, Avery was able to solve all these problems. Ultimately, his lab handled 50 liters of pneumococci at a time when pneumococci were a major cause of death in the United States. A model of transformation was developed that did not involve mouse injections, so all experiments could be done in test tubes.

The second problem—showing that only DNA was present in the transforming material—was more difficult to solve. Advocates of protein as the genetic material insisted that extremely small amounts of protein still might be present despite rigorous attempts at purification.

Max Delbrück on the Vanderbilt campus, sometime in the 1940s

The prevailing assumption that the heritable material must be proteinaceous was, perhaps, the reason Avery did not receive the Nobel Prize. Major resistance to acceptance of Avery’s work came from members of the Rockefeller Institute, so personality conflicts with Avery also may have played a role. More important, a study performed at the Rockefeller Institute in the 1930s had refuted work by leading European investigators who had mistakenly concluded that enzymes were carbohydrates. The conclusions of the Rockefeller study—that enzymes were, in fact, proteins—strongly reinforced the perception of the time that all important chemicals, including the one responsible for heredity, must be made of protein. This perception was very much on the minds of Avery and his colleagues as they gradually came to the conclusion that the genetic material in pneumococci was not proteinaceous but was carbohydrate-rich.

Avery’s work was confirmed convincingly in 1952, three years before his death, by experiments involving bacteriophages, viruses that infect bacteria—which brings us to our second pathfinder, Max Delbrück.
This remarkable German scientist possessed an unusual combination of skill in mathematical physics and interest in applying his knowledge to the borderland between biology and physics. The use of bacteriophages to study general biological mechanisms is directly attributable to Delbrück, who won a Rockefeller grant to study in the United States beginning in 1937 and came to Vanderbilt to teach physics in 1940.

Delbrück did teach, but focused his energies on research in biology; he was intrigued by the apparent simplicity of bacteriophages and decided they were ideal for studying microbial genetics. He was at Vanderbilt seven years, based in the Department of Physics, but his research was carried out in the Department of Biology in Buttrick Hall. (His laboratory in Buttrick Hall was in Room 316; a plaque recently placed on a nearby wall commemorates his working there.)

In 1940 he met Salvador Luria, an Italian refugee working at Indiana University, with whom he began a productive collaboration on bacteriophages. Their paper “Mutations of Bacteria from Virus Sensitivity to Virus Resistance” is generally acknowledged to have signaled the birth of microbial genetics in 1943. Delbrück and Luria later collaborated in research with Alfred Hershey, and jointly they received the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine in 1969.

Delbrück was one of the first to learn in 1943 that Avery had identified DNA as the genetic material in pneumococci. One of the more famous communications in science is a letter written May 13, 1943, from Oswald Avery to his brother, Roy, who was then on the microbiology faculty at Vanderbilt. Now in the Tennessee Archives, this letter summarized in an informal way Avery’s work and thoughts about DNA.

After a long description of the problems involved in purifying the transforming substance, Avery wrote, “In short, this substance is highly reactive and on elementary analysis conforms very closely to the theoretical values of pure deoxyribose nucleic acid type. (Who could have guessed it?)” Later in the letter he speculates, “But today it takes a lot of well-documented evidence to convince anyone that the sodium salt of deoxyribose nucleic acid, protein-free, could possibly be endowed with such biologically active and specific properties, and that is the evidence we are now trying to get. It is lots of fun to blow bubbles, but it is wiser to prick them yourself before someone else tries to.”

Max Delbrück was shown the letter shortly after its receipt, recognized its significance, and much later helped resurrect it from an attic storage trunk in Roy Avery’s home.

In Max Delbrück, Vanderbilt obviously had a world-class biologist on its faculty, a scientist widely known for his tremendous intellect, far-ranging vision and charisma. Delbrück is generally recognized as the fountainhead of molecular biology. Vanderbilt provided a happy and productive environment for him. During his Nashville years he married “Manny” Bruce of Pasadena, and their first child was born at Vanderbilt Hospital.

However, in 1947 Vanderbilt and Max Delbrück parted. He had approached the graduate dean, Dr. Philip Davidson, with a request to set up a new department to be called “molecular biology,” requesting an amount greater than the total budget of the Natural Science Division. The request could not be funded, so Delbrück went to Cal Tech, the institution with which most molecular biologists associate his name and where he remained until his death in 1981. At Cal Tech (and during a summer course at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory), he spawned and mentored a vigorous and prolific group of microbial geneticists, several of whom ultimately were awarded Nobel prizes.

Throughout his life Delbrück was very appreciative of the opportunities he had at Vanderbilt and in the U.S. to concentrate on science while the world was in turmoil.

The transformative generosity of 205,000 donors has touched the lives of each and every member of the Vanderbilt campus community and provided resources for the university to better serve its missions of education, discovery and patient care.

In one sense the campaign’s priorities were straightforward, the basic building blocks of any quality institution: great students, great faculty, and great resources for teaching and discovery—including imaginative programs, libraries, and facilities for living, learning and caring for patients.

What was unique was how the campaign’s priorities were focused to match the mission and vision set forth for Vanderbilt in its strategic plan. Coalescing ideas from the university’s 10 schools and medical center, Vanderbilt’s strategic plan was committed to paper by the man who now finds himself at the helm of the university: Chancellor Nicholas S. Zeppos, then associate provost, soon to be named provost by Chancellor Gordon Gee in 2002.

The plan called for building on Vanderbilt’s special strengths in undergraduate education by creating a residential college system now termed College Halls; significantly expanding student financial aid through scholarships; and attracting and keeping outstanding faculty through endowed chairs. Innovative research would be advanced by investing in faculty, laboratory space and programs where Vanderbilt could envision making distinctive contributions and where disciplines intersected—especially connecting innovative scientists and engineers with talented biomedical researchers.

The campaign launched publicly in April 2003 with Monroe Carell Jr., BE’59, at the helm. A clear choice to lead the major campaign, Carell, the retired head of Central Parking Inc., had successfully spearheaded fundraising for the freestanding, state-of-the-art children’s hospital that now bears his name. He quickly enlisted others to work with him, met frequently with staff and other volunteers, and added the cause of scholarships and chairs as a focus for his own philanthropy.

At the launch event Carell announced a goal of $1.25 billion for gifts and pledges with more than $800 million already in campaign coffers, thanks to the foundational gift of the Ingram family, Carell’s personal philanthropy, and early pledges from university trustees and others. A second goal of $100 million for new planned bequests also was set.

By September 2004, donors had given and pledged $1 billion. In April 2006, with the $1.25 billion mark in sight, the Board of Trust increased the overall campaign goal to $1.75 billion and extended the timeline. The following fall, the goal for new planned bequests was increased to $150 million.

Monroe Carell would not live to see the full fruit of his leadership. Cancer claimed his life in June 2008.

A few months later, after years of planning, the university announced a bold new step: Opportunity Vanderbilt. This initiative signaled an unprecedented commitment to making Vanderbilt accessible to all qualified students. It called for an additional $100 million specifically for need-based undergraduate scholarship endowment—the next step in helping the university ensure access to a Vanderbilt education by replacing student loans with grants and scholarships in Vanderbilt aid packages.

Trustee Emeritus H. Rodes Hart, BA’54, leader of Peabody College’s campaign committee, was named Shape the Future’s new chair in October 2008, and Orrin Ingram, BA’82, was named vice chair.

Hart and his wife, Patricia Ingram Hart, BA’57, have made significant investments at Vanderbilt, with particular focus on strengthening the faculty. They have endowed multiple chairs at Peabody College and the medical center. Declaring his new role as chair of the campaign a “chance to give back to the university that has given so much to my life,” Hart quickly began meeting with donors, reporting to the board, and jotting frequent notes of thanks. Both he and Orrin Ingram, who had earlier led the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center campaign, fully embraced the task of finishing Shape the Future in rousing fashion.

Citing statistics is easy—campaigns can generate overwhelming numbers—but the stats only tell part of the story. The real story lies in the impact of donor philanthropy on Vanderbilt—on the students, faculty, staff and patients here now, and those yet to come. The real story is what 900,000 gifts have helped and will continue to help make possible.

With significant lead gifts, Vanderbilt created The Commons for all first-year students, providing an environment for sharing houses with faculty, building community, fostering friendships, and learning the special qualities of the university’s civil and collegial culture. Opened in 2008 and recently named in honor of Martha Ingram, The Ingram Commons is the first phase of College Halls, Vanderbilt’s version of a residential college system. Building on the success of The Ingram Commons and further philanthropy, construction will begin in 2012 on two new college halls for sophomores, juniors and seniors, replacing Kissam Quadrangle.

More than 1,300 donors helped to expand undergraduate financial aid to make Vanderbilt accessible to greater numbers of talented students. Thanks to greater accessibility, the strong draw of residential life in The Ingram Commons and intensified recruiting, the number of admissions applications has soared to 25,000 for 1,600 spaces. Last year 1,000 of these first-year students were the only ones from their high schools enrolled at Vanderbilt—underscoring the value of a residential community where students quickly feel at home.

Students from all 50 states and more than 30 countries bring diverse backgrounds and experiences—as well as a commonality of distinguished academic achievement, leadership, and extraordinary service to school and community. Attracted by outstanding faculty, the number of graduate applications also has increased along with the number of Ph.D.s awarded.

A dramatic increase in the number of endowed faculty chairs—from 97 before the campaign began to 289 today—has helped attract and retain outstanding scholars, researchers and teachers across the campus and in the medical center. Faculty investment enhances the student experience by expanding curricular offerings and providing research opportunities, while at the same time fostering an environment in which faculty successfully compete for coveted research grants and prizes as Vanderbilt’s national and international profile continues to grow.

Shape the Future gifts have helped build the soon-to-be-expanded Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt, the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center, and the Eskind Diabetes Center. Philanthropy has played a role in the construction of three major medical research buildings and numerous clinics, providing unsurpassed opportunities for extraordinary patient care and discovery.

The generosity of Shape the Future donors has enabled major renovations to Commodore athletics facilities, new and expanded engineering facilities in Featheringill Hall, the Ben Schulman Center for Jewish Life, a new E. Bronson Ingram Studio Arts Center, an expanded Blair School of Music including the Martha Rivers Ingram Center for the Performing Arts, and a major expansion and renovation of Vanderbilt Law School.

From the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise and Public Policy to human genetics, students are embracing all that Vanderbilt has to offer. That fact is evidenced by a 97 percent student retention rate from freshman to sophomore year.

Year in and year out, annual fund gifts from alumni and friends will still be needed to sustain and advance programs and to add to endowment that undergirds scholarships and chairs.

As Zeppos points out, the word philanthropy means “love of humanity.”

“What I’ve learned is that people who have been blessed with resources want to make a difference in somebody else’s life and in society,” Zeppos says. “I believe very deeply that it really matters for Vanderbilt to be here, to thrive, and to have the resources to teach and heal and discover.”

Michael Burry, MD’97, studied economics and premedical training at UCLA before enrolling at Vanderbilt. He continued his medical education as a resident at Stanford University Hospital before leaving after his third residency year to found Scion Capital. Burry’s transition into the world of finance was eased by years of running a finance website that had been chosen as a Forbes “Best of the Web” winner in stock picking. Burry was profiled in author Michael Lewis’ best-selling book The Big Short.

Brian Montague

Brian Montague, BA’81, is a fourth-generation Hattiesburg, Miss., native who has a law practice in his hometown. In 2009, at age 50, he deployed to Iraq, serving as a colonel in the JAG Corps with the 155th Brigade Combat Team, leaving behind his wife and two school-age sons.

Kathy Hutson

Kathy Hutson, MS’70, grew up in South Bend, Ind., and earned her undergraduate degree in speech therapy from Saint Louis University. She spent her career working in Appalachia. In 1999 she moved to Abingdon, Va., to help develop a co-housing community for seniors, the ElderSpirit Community, which opened in 2006. Hutson lives in ElderSpirit (elderspirit.org) and participates in committee work and in spiritual and cultural events. She may be reached at kathyhutson@embarqmail.com.

Andrew Krinks

Andrew Krinks is pursuing a master of theological studies degree at Vanderbilt Divinity School. He is editor of The Contributor, a newspaper sold and produced in Nashville primarily by homeless or formerly homeless people. Krinks, co-founder of Amos House, has taught writing and poetry at the Tennessee Prison for Women and has been an activist in petitioning for more low-income housing in Nashville. He received his undergraduate degree from Lipscomb University, where he served as editor of the student literary magazine, Exordium.

Robert Collins

Dr. Robert Collins, BA’48, MD’51, has been on the Vanderbilt faculty since 1957. Teaching medical students how to solve problems was his focus for 40 years, during which time he and his wife, Elizabeth Cate Collins, BA’50, welcomed generations of students and faculty into their home. His second career, begun in 1999, currently encompasses writing, collaborative research, and teaching residents microscopy. He has written four books: two in his field of hematopathology, the third a biography of Vanderbilt scientist Ernest Goodpasture, and the fourth titled Ahmic Lake Connections, The Founding Leadership of Vanderbilt University.

Additional Contributors: Carole Bartoo, Joanne Lamphere Beckham, Craig Boerner, Megan Denson, Angela Fox, Patricia Kovalcheck, Peter Letarte, Princine Lewis, Richard McCarty, Missy Pankake, Jim Patterson, Lisa Robbins, David F. Salisbury, Thomas Samuel, Donna B. Smith, Bill Snyder, Dagny Stuart, Cindy Thomsen, Amy Wolf

Editorial

• Associate Editor and Production Manager
  Phillip B. Tucker
• Arts & Culture Editor
  Bonnie Arant Ertelt, BS’81
• Class Notes and Sports Editor
  Nelson Bryan, BA’73

Photography and Imaging

• Director, Photography Services
  Daniel Dubois
• Photographers
  Steve Green, Joe Howell, Anne Rayner, John Russell, Susan Urmy
• Assistant Designers
  Aimee Swartz, Keith Wood
• Color Correction and Retouching
  Julie Luckett Turner

Web Edition Design and Development
Jeff Kirkwood

Vanderbilt Magazine Advisory Board

• Roy Blount Jr., BA’63
• Caneel Cotton, BA’88
• Terry Eastland, BA’71
• Sam Feist, BA’91
• Frye Gaillard Jr., BA’68
• Janice Miller Greenberg, BS’80
• G. Marc Hamburger, BA’64
• Molly Henneberg, BS’95
• Ann McDaniel, BA’77
• Wendell Rawls Jr., BA’70
• Edward Schumacher Matos, BA’68
• Beth Fortune
• Susie Stalcup

Vanderbilt Magazine is published three times per year by Vanderbilt University from editorial and business offices at the Loews Vanderbilt Office Complex, 2100 West End Ave., Suite 820, Nashville, TN 37203. Phone: (615) 322-1003. Web version: www.vanderbilt.edu/vanderbiltmagazine.

Email: vanderbiltmagazine@vanderbilt.edu. Please send address corrections to Gift Processing Office, Vanderbilt University, PMB 407727, 2301 Vanderbilt Place, Nashville, TN 37240-7727. Vanderbilt Magazine is printed on recycled paper by Lane Press in Burlington, Vt.

Opinions expressed in Vanderbilt Magazine are those of the individual authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the magazine or the university administration.

Vanderbilt University is committed to the principles of equal opportunity and affirmative action.

Copyright 2011 Vanderbilt University