VICB Student & Post Doc Testimonials
     
   
Catherine Prudom, Postdoctoral Fellow
  "Choosing to do research in Vanderbilt University’s Chemistry department has been by far the best decision I have made since beginning my career in science. The atmosphere is highly collaborative and open and the research buildings are within a 5 minute walk of each other so if you need to get to a meeting somewhere else on campus you don’t have to plan your entire day around it and worry about where you will park when you get there. In my graduate thesis work many of the experiments I wanted to do required me to go to other labs and beg and borrow from friends or strangers and sometimes use equipment for which I was not properly trained. The many core facilities Vanderbilt enable my research to progress at a much faster pace in part because of the excellent equipment but also because of the expert support staff available to maintain the equipment properly and answer questions or give advice. A few weeks ago I was able to do mass spec at 9:00 a.m. and flow cytometry at 10:30 a.m. because the facilities are nearby and the staff are excellent."
     
   
Suzanne Brady, Postdoctoral Fellow
  "I continue to be impressed by the friendly and collaborative research environment at Vanderbilt, which has been instrumental in allowing me to pursue an interdisciplinary project in drug discovery. Whenever I have needed a specific reagent, cell line or piece of equipment from another laboratory, everyone has always been very considerate and eager to help me, which in turn fosters my desire to help others. When you conduct research at Vanderbilt, you're not just part of a lab, you're part of a campus-wide team."
     
   
Tom Bridges, Doctoral Candidate
  "The Vanderbilt research community has many strong inter-laboratory collaborations, which are fostered by an open and friendly environment full of talented individuals who share a common attitude towards advancement of scientific discovery. The frequent seminars on topics spanning many disciplines as well the technological resources and expertise provided by the numerous core facilities encourages research projects that span multiple departments and take advantage of diverse methodologies. For example, a project that may have began as a basic science hypothesis in a pharmacology lab can grow to include collaboration between a synthetic chemistry lab, a high throughput screening center, a molecular biology lab, and an x-ray crystallography group -- all of which utilize a wide range of techniques and resources. These types of cross-department interactions serve as one of the more prominent and valuable aspects of research at Vanderbilt."
     
   
Joel Musee, Medical Scientist Training Program Student
 

“Vanderbilt has a rich environment, primed for discovery. Core resources - mass spec and NMR - are available 24x7! The ease with which Resources are shared is unprecedented.”
     
   
Jana Lewis, Postdoctoral Fellow
  “The strength of Vanderbilt’s translational research program attracted me to the Integrative Training in Therapeutic Discovery program within the VICB. The Lindsley lab with its many collaborations is really like a small to medium sized pharmaceutical company with impressive resources to advance potential drugs for neurodegenerative diseases with the (P. Jeffrey) Conn lab and for novel cancer therapeutics with the (H. Alex) Brown and (Dennis) Hallahan labs."
     
   
Robert Lavieri, Graduate Student
  "Vanderbilt is the kind of place where your hard work absolutely will yield great results. In my first year, before even joining a lab, I wrote two separate molecule of the month page long articles in Current Topics in Medicinal Chemistry under the guidance of Dr. Craig Lindsley."
     
   
Evan P. Lebois , Graduate Student
  "Working here at Vanderbilt has allowed me to take part in very cutting-edge translational research that crosses the boundaries of several different disciplines. This, combined with the collegial atmosphere Vanderbilt fosters so well has offered me an unparalleled opportunity to publish a number of significant scientific findings."