Quantum Potential

Josh Clinton, Abby and Jon Winkelried Chair and professor of political science, and co-director of the Vanderbilt Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, joins Provost C. Cybele Raver to discuss how transparency and increasing public literacy about statistics—including an awareness of limitations—can disrupt Americans’ mounting distrust in polling data. Read More

In this live performance turned Quantum Potential episode, Provost C. Cybele Raver hosts an extraordinary musical collaboration between Ji Hye Jung, associate professor of percussion at Vanderbilt’s Blair School of Music, and the multi–Grammy Award–winning Attacca Quartet—Amy Schroeder and Domenic Salerni (violins), Nathan Schram (viola), and Andrew Yee (cello). The result? A rich exploration of what it means to be a classical musician in the 21st century. Read More

See how historian Jane Landers and her team are rescuing enslaved Africans’ stories from oblivion and honoring thousands of lives. Read More

Mariam Adam puts a priority in her work on innovative musical collaborations that benefit her students while building a legacy to be discovered by future generations. The assistant professor of clarinet is a fierce advocate for music education who has performed with such greats as Wayne Shorter, Chick Corea and Herbie Hancock. Read More

Bennett Landman who holds a Stevenson Chair, has more than 2,000 collaborations globally that look at all sorts of different diseases, from the head down to the shins. But the heart of his work remains medicine and the promise of a world where AI-driven imaging leads to earlier diagnoses and better patient outcomes. Read More

In this episode of Quantum Potential, Felipe Barrera-Osorio joins Provost C. Cybele Raver to discuss his groundbreaking research—comparing the impact of need-based versus merit-based micro-scholarship programs in rural, low-income communities in Cambodia, Colombia and Mexico. He explains how these programs were so successful that national governments around the world expanded investments in education. Read More

Read the stories of what motivates members of Vanderbilt's faculty to pursue excellence as researchers, professors, experts and innovators. Read More

Understanding how proteins get from point A to point B is top of mind for Stephanie Wankowicz, assistant professor of molecular physiology and biophysics and principal investigator at the Wankowicz lab. She conducts research on how entropy, a measure of the tendency toward disorder or randomness within a system, shifts when a protein binds to a drug or another protein. Now, her work is being shared through the diffUSE project, a new multi-institutional collaboration focused on reshaping the future of structural biology by moving beyond traditional “snapshot” views of proteins to reveal their full dynamic motions. Read More

As Cornelius Vanderbilt Professor of Physics and chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy, Julia Velkovska studies the tiny particles that form our universe. She focuses on how nuclear matter behaves when confronted with extreme density and temperatures (think trillions of degrees)—similar to the conditions existing microseconds after the big bang, right as the universe was starting to take shape. Just this year, Velkovska and her team of physicists were awarded the 2025 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, along with 13,508 colleagues across four landmark CERN experiments. The prize honors decades of work expanding our understanding of the physical universe. Read More

Dean Pamela Jeffries of the Vanderbilt University School of Nursing conducts research around innovative instruction using technology and simulations that give student nurses a way to begin learning how to make clinical decisions without putting patients at risk. Read More