President Joe Biden has appointed Vanderbilt Peabody College research professor Douglas Fuchs to serve on the 15-member National Board for Education Sciences. The board ensures institute priorities are consistent with the organization’s mission and reviews and approves procedures for technical and scientific peer review of institute activities. An internationally recognized expert on interventions for children with learning disabilities and behavior disorders, Fuchs is a research professor in the Departments of Special Education and Psychology and Human Development at Peabody and an institute fellow at the American Institutes for Research. Fuchs has directed 50 federal research grants that have developed approaches to service delivery (e.g., pre-referral intervention, response-to-intervention), assessments (e.g., measures of student progress, dynamic assessment) and instruction (e.g., peer-mediated learning strategies). MORE

Biomedical engineering doctoral student Sarah Goodale has been awarded a National Institute on Aging Transition to Postdoc Fellowship for her proposed work on investigating fatigue and sleep disturbance symptoms in Alzheimer’s Disease and their relationship with functional and structural properties of the brain and intellectual decline. The National Institutes of Health NIA F99/K00 award supports graduate students while they finish their dissertation research on any topic. The support continues to a postdoctoral position conducting research on aging. The major goals of her project are to understand how functional patterns in the brain related to vigilance regulation—changes from alert to drowsy to sleep—are impacted by the loss of brain matter in relevant structural pathways of the brain and how both properties influence progression of age-related cognitive decline. MORE

Vanderbilt researchers’ partnership with Ancora Innovation LLC, a Deerfield Management company that supports Vanderbilt University’s innovative life science research, has added an effort to develop therapeutics for a rare form of epilepsy. This is the fourth drug discovery and development program supported through the Ancora-Vanderbilt collaboration. The program is aimed to address an infant-onset seizure disorder caused by mutations in a gene that affects neurotransmission in the brain and can result in abnormal electrical activity, such as seizures. These conditions are resistant to most current epilepsy treatments. Thus, new therapeutic approaches are desperately needed. The goal of the latest Ancora-funded research is to build on Vanderbilt research and advance this project from early development to identification of a clinically viable compound. MORE

School of Nursing nurses and a social scientist from the College of Arts and Science have teamed up to mitigate health disparities related to climate change. Professor of Nursing Carol Ziegler, DNP’12, MSN’06, Assistant Professor of Nursing James Muchira, PhD, and Professor of the Practice in Climate Studies Zdravka Tzankova, PhD, have launched the Climate, Energy and Health Equity Lab (CHEEL), based at the Wond’ry and partially funded by a Vanderbilt Immersion Scholar Grant. The lab will use research and social innovation to tackle climate, energy and health equity problems of high incidence globally, but particularly pervasive in Tennessee and the U.S. as a whole. As part of their work, members of the CHEEL lab want to determine how corporations and institutions can lower carbon emissions in ways that produce tangible economic, health and environmental benefits for marginalized communities and disadvantaged populations. MORE

The Office for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion, in collaboration with the undergraduate student organizations FirstVU and QuestBridge Vanderbilt as well as the Network First-Gen initiative, invites members of the Vanderbilt community to participate in First-Generation Appreciation Week Nov. 3–11. The Center for First-Generation Student Success initiated this nationwide event to honor the resilience, motivation and accomplishments of first-generation students and graduates at colleges and universities across the country. This year Vanderbilt is hosting five events, both virtually and in person, to recognize and celebrate first-generation college students and allies to this community. MORE

On Oct. 13 and 14, 19 Vanderbilt Ph.D. students and postdoctoral scholars traveled to Washington, D.C., to attend the fifth in-person Federal STEM Policy and Advocacy seminar. Vanderbilt University’s and Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s offices of federal relations hosted the two-day conference in partnership with The Vanderbilt Graduate School, the BRET Career Development ASPIRE Program, the Office of Postdoctoral Affairs, the Russell G. Hamilton Graduate Leadership Institute and the Vanderbilt University Career Center. While a condensed virtual version of the event was offered in fall 2020 and 2021, this was the first in-person federal STEM seminar since 2018. MORE