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Department of Education—Tennessee Education Research Alliance receives $1.7M grant to explore opportunities for increasing teacher diversity across Tennessee
Though 37 percent of Tennessee’s students are people of color, only 13 percent of the state’s teachers are, according to a 2018 report by the Tennessee Department of Education. To work toward narrowing that representation gap, the Tennessee Education Research Alliance has received a four-year, $1.7 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences. TERA, a research-practice partnership between Vanderbilt Peabody College of education and human development and the Tennessee Department of Education, will investigate pathways into teaching for Tennessee teachers of color and barriers they encounter along those pathways. Researchers will conduct extensive interviews with teacher candidates, preparation program leaders, school and district leaders, and early-career teachers alongside analysis of survey data and state data on potential teachers’ movement through preparation programs and into classrooms. MORE
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National Science Foundation—Vanderbilt’s Frist Center for Autism & Innovation wins NSF grant to support neurodiverse engineering students in their education, careersThe Vanderbilt School of Engineering’s Frist Center for Autism & Innovation, working in partnership with Fisk University, has won a $1.9 million grant from the National Science Foundation to create a system of programs to support neurodiverse students in engineering majors and careers. The Autism Self-advocacy Center for Equity and Neurodiversity in Engineering (A-SCENE) at Vanderbilt University will support students in their undergraduate education, in graduate training and professional development programs, and entry level jobs that require science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) knowledge and expertise. This new NSF grant will support a multi-phase assessment of current programs, policies and practices at Vanderbilt and Fisk and the development of new ones as needed. Phase II includes partnerships with other core universities and national dissemination of best practices. MORE
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National Institutes of Health—Researchers create algorithm to help predict cancer risk associated with tumor variants
Vanderbilt researchers have developed an active machine learning approach to predict the effects of tumor variants of unknown significance, or VUS, on sensitivity to chemotherapy. Even machine learning, an artificial intelligence tool that leverages data to “learn” and boost performance, falls short when classifying some VUS. Recent work by the lab of Walter Chazin, Chancellor’s Chair in Medicine and professor of biochemistry and chemistry, . . . featured an active machine learning technique. Active machine learning relies on training an algorithm with existing data, as with machine learning, and feeding it new information between rounds of training. Chazin and his lab identified VUS for which predictions were least certain, performed biochemical experiments on those VUS and incorporated the resulting data into subsequent rounds of algorithm training. This allowed the model to continuously improve its VUS classification. [This work was funded in part by the National Institutes of Health.] MORE
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National Science Foundation—Barrera-Osorio, Dustan receive $400,000 grant to study public-private schools in Bogotá, ColombiaMany governments around the world agree that access to education is a human right that benefits the greater social good, but how they decide to provide education differs depending on economic, social and cultural concerns. Governments of lower- and middle-income countries are increasingly turning to public-private partnership programs to operate schools that deliver education to low-income families as an alternative to traditional public schools, according to Felipe Barrera-Osorio, associate professor of public policy, education and economics at Vanderbilt Peabody College of education and human development. He and Andrew Dustan, assistant professor of economics in the Vanderbilt College of Arts and Science, recently received a one-year grant in excess of $400,000 from the National Science Foundation to lead an interdisciplinary study on the quality of these partnership schools in Bogotá, Colombia, and on how families decide whether to send their children to them. This study has the potential to affect educational policy in these countries as low-fee private schools are increasingly viewed as a possible means of improving learning outcomes. MORE
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‘Peabody Journal of Education’ issue addresses COVID-19’s impact on education policy, equity and social justice
The Peabody Journal of Education is one of the first education policy journals to document the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the politics of education using rigorous, peer-reviewed studies. Published in July, the latest issue, “The Politics of COVID-19 and Educational Inequities,” focuses on the pandemic’s consequences for equity and social justice, with insights on the PK-16 education system’s initial response to COVID-19 and how the first year of the pandemic affected education and educational inequality. Collectively, the articles in this issue suggest a critical need for further research on the educational, ethical and political concerns related to the pandemic. MORE
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Vanderbilt research on nuclear safety offers new pathways for clean energy, leads to industry awards
Two leading energy companies that used a Vanderbilt-pioneered process to develop safer nuclear reactors received a prestigious technology award from the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) in June. A team led by Steve Krahn, professor of the practice of nuclear environmental engineering, worked in collaboration with EPRI to develop a “safety-in-design” methodology that was adopted by Southern Company and TerraPower. Krahn said the collaboration with EPRI has involved nearly 10 years of developing, refining and implementing methods to enhance the environmental, health and safety performance of nuclear facilities. Vanderbilt and EPRI are continuing to collaborate and work with additional advanced reactor designers and the U.S. Department of Energy to develop more concepts to integrate safety into their design processes. MORE
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Harvey receives prestigious Ford Foundation Senior Fellowship, a first for Vanderbilt
Associate Professor of Anthropology T.S. Harvey has been awarded a Ford Foundation Senior Fellowship—a first for a Vanderbilt faculty member—for his environmental justice and public health work in Guatemala. Harvey is one of only two 2022 recipients of the senior fellowship, which is intended to support research that advances and contributes knowledge to sciences, engineering and medicine. The fellowships also support the Ford Foundation’s aims to increase the ethnic and racial diversity of college and university faculty and expand resources to educate and enrich students. Harvey’s research . . . focuses on expanding scientific partnerships, developing innovative technologies and building local capacities to collaboratively tackle large-scale public health and environmental challenges—notably those that emerge at the critical intersection of vulnerable populations, environmental degradation, disease, health disparities, risk, communication and misinformation. MORE
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The Sky Is for Everyone: A definitive collection of stories from the women reshaping astronomy since 1960David Weintraub, professor of astronomy, is the co-editor of The Sky Is for Everyone: Women Astronomers in Their Own Words. The book, a collection of autobiographical essays by female astronomers, was published in June 2022 by Princeton University Press. Weintraub teamed up with his co-editor Virginia Trimble, professor of physics and astronomy at the University of California, Irvine, to record and preserve the history of an important era of social change in the history of astronomy, beginning roughly in the mid-20th century and ongoing today.Through this book, Weintraub and Trimble aim to pay tribute to the women who pushed forward in the face of discrimination. The book’s 37 chapters are international in scope, including contributions by astronomers born in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, England, Northern Ireland, Scotland, Netherlands, France, Lithuania, Poland, Greece, Romania, Israel, Zimbabwe, India, Sri Lanka, China and Japan. MORE
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Black girl joy, brilliance and magic is front and center at the inaugural Black Girls Becoming summer programAs buzz begins to build for the release of former First Lady Michelle Obama’s next book, The Light We Carry, a unique summer program inspired by her first book, Becoming, celebrates its first cohort. The inaugural Black Girls Becoming Summer Research Institute was held at Vanderbilt University on June 5-17, 2022, and hosted 19 rising seventh- and eighth-grade girls from metro Nashville and as far away as Memphis for a no-cost, residential learning experience. The girls learned more about themselves and their peers through classes in science research, critical consciousness, the arts (visual, physical, and abstract) and financial literacy. It is the first research and enrichment program of its kind that is centered on understanding the impacts, both positive and negative, on Black students and toward advancing the life outcomes of Black girls in society. MORE
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Janey Camp to lead Vanderbilt Engineering center focused on transportation researchJaney Camp has been named the director of the Vanderbilt Engineering Center for Transportation and Operational Resiliency (VECTOR) where interdisciplinary groups work on a variety of transportation and infrastructure resilience projects using groundbreaking applications and risk management practices. VECTOR research projects emphasize the integration of transportation engineering, planning and management. Current projects are focused on smart cities, safety, security and risk management, climate change, transportation system management, policy and operations, intermodal freight and advanced information systems. [Camp's] interdisciplinary research focuses on developing tools and approaches to understanding vulnerabilities of infrastructure systems and natural hazards for improved decision support and planning. MORE
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