Vanderbilt faculty filled the Student Life Center for the 2025 Fall Faculty Assembly on Aug. 28, listening as Chancellor Daniel Diermeier and Provost C. Cybele Raver lauded their achievements and dedication to students amid significant challenges facing higher education.
Faculty Senate Chair and Professor of Emergency Medicine Tyler Barrett opened this year's assembly, which included the presentation of some of the university's most prestigious awards. Barrett encouraged the room to "Grow with Vanderbilt," the faculty theme for the 2025-26 academic year, as Vanderbilt's physical footprint expands and its community continues a powerful trajectory of personal growth.
RADICAL COLLABORATION: "BOLD IDEAS, PARTNERSHIPS"
Barrett then introduced Provost Raver, who thanked faculty for making Vanderbilt "not just a place of learning, but a place of transformation," praising their teaching, research, mentorship and creative work. Citing student feedback gathered during coffees and lunches, Raver highlighted how professors challenge students, bring them into labs and projects, and help them envision new futures-an impact that shapes lives and careers.
She also lauded faculty for conducting groundbreaking research, creating art that moves culture forward and developing technologies and therapies that change lives. "This is a community defined not by prestige or exclusivity, but by shared ambition and purpose," Raver said. "And I see that purpose in the bold ideas you bring forward, the partnerships you create and the energy you pour into shaping the future of your fields."
AMBITIOUS GROWTH: "THINK BIGGER, REACH HIGHER"
Chancellor Diermeier then spoke to the faculty in attendance, affirming community and shared governance, even as higher education faces a "volatile and unsettling time." He noted that the university is leading a reform effort that seeks to restore public trust in higher education by returning to core principles. "The most important thing we can do as a university is to continue to do our work well. And, in that, we are succeeding beyond expectations," Diermeier said.
He also cited Vanderbilt's growing recognition, with awards ranging from MacArthur Fellowships to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, student-athletes excelling in class and competition, and a record number of applications for admission to Vanderbilt's schools and colleges. Diermeier noted that the university is "pressing ahead" with ambitious growth-presences in New York City and West Palm Beach; the College of Connected Computing; and an innovation neighborhood to drive research and entrepreneurship. "As other universities pull back, we are leaning in, just as we did so successfully during the uncertainty of COVID," Diermeier said. "Now, using the same principles, we can operate with a higher metabolism. We can be faster, more agile and more ambitious than our peers." He closed with a call to unity and aspiration: "Let's continue to think bigger and reach higher … as One Vanderbilt."
FACULTY AWARDS
After his address, Diermeier recognized the 41 faculty members who reached the milestone of serving 25 years at Vanderbilt during 2024 before presenting this year's service and research awards alongside Raver and Barrett.
The Thomas Jefferson Award honors a faculty member for distinguished service to Vanderbilt through extraordinary contributions as a member of the faculty in the councils and government of the university. This year's honoree is Joel Harrington, Centennial Professor of History.
Harrington explores the social history of Europe through compelling books that bring that history to life, from the lives of orphans in early modern Germany, a medieval Christian mystic or a 16th century executioner. While researching and writing acclaimed books, winning prestigious grants, teaching and mentoring, Harrington has also been committed to serving the university during his more than 30 years at Vanderbilt. This has included serving on Faculty Council and Faculty Senate, as department chair for history and as director of the Center for European Studies. As associate provost for global strategy, he has also helped make global learning a core part of the undergraduate experience and opened the university to the world.
Nine faculty members received the Chancellor's Award for Research, which recognizes excellence in works of research, scholarship or creative expression published or presented in the past three calendar years.
David Cortez, professor of biochemistry, and Rahul Bhowmick, assistant professor of biochemistry, were nominated for their work, "RAD51 Bypasses the CMG Helicase to Promote Replication Fork Reversal," which was published in the journal Science. In their paper, Cortez and Bhowmick demonstrate that the protein RAD51 facilitates this reversal by bypassing the CMG helicase complex, a key enzyme that acts like a molecular zipper to separate the two DNA strands for DNA replication. This bypass mechanism keeps the replication machinery intact and allows the process to restart after the stress is resolved. The findings revise long-standing assumptions and provide a more nuanced understanding of maintaining genome stability.
Marcelo Disconzi, associate professor of mathematics, was nominated for his work presented in "First-Order General-Relativistic Viscous Fluid Dynamics," published in the journal Physical Review X. The work provides a solution to a problem in physics and mathematics that has been unsolved for nearly a century: It formulates a theory of viscous fluid dynamics that is compatible with Einstein's theory of general relativity. The resulting framework is now known as the BDNK theory-named after its developers, Bemfica, Disconzi, Noronha and Kovtun. BDNK theory is a more rigorous, mathematically proven framework for studying relativistic viscous fluids and addresses inconsistencies that were problematic in earlier models.
Lisa Fazio, associate professor of psychology and human development, was nominated for her work in "The Psychological Drivers of Misinformation Belief and Its Resistance to Correction," published in Nature Reviews Psychology. Fazio and her co-authors present a comprehensive synthesis of the psychological research on the cognitive, social and emotional factors at work. They explore ways to counter the psychological barriers that may prevent an individual from updating their knowledge base when presented with new, correct information. This important work integrates decades of research to provide evidence-based interventions and create a framework to address this major challenge of the 21st century.
David Michelson, associate professor of the history of Christianity, was nominated for his book, The Library of Paradise: A History of Contemplative Reading in the Monasteries of the Church of the East. The spiritual practice of contemplative reading moves the practitioner from reading to meditation, to prayer, to divine vision. Michelson's work offers a historical narrative of this practice-its origin, evolution and diffusion-beginning in Syriac Christian monasteries of the Church of the East in Mesopotamia in the sixth and seventh centuries. He also shows its parallel development with Latin lectio divina, or "divine reading," in Western Christianity, demonstrating that the practice crossed geographic and linguistic boundaries throughout the centuries.
Ruth Rogaski, professor of history, was nominated for her book, Knowing Manchuria: Environments, the Senses, and Natural Knowledge on an Asian Borderland, a comprehensive historical exploration of a region at the heart of the Chinese, Russian, Korean and Japanese empires. By examining the intricate interplay between environmental factors and societal transformations over centuries, Rogaski reveals how Manchuria evolved from an unknown and marginal space into a politicized focal point. Weaving together primary accounts from travelers, scientists and politicians, she highlights how the control of territory and resources shaped empires, influenced understanding of disease and facilitated the dissemination of scientific knowledge.
Ganesh Sitaraman, professor of law, was nominated for his book, Why Flying Is Miserable: And How to Fix It. Sitaraman argues that the cause of almost every problem with air travel today is a function of airline deregulation. The book is told through both history and commentary, featuring compelling characters, fast-paced descriptions of the competitive atmosphere of the 1980s airline industry, and straightforward analysis designed for everyday readers to see how government policies affect their lives. It challenges the idea that airline deregulation was successful and creates a path to rethink how to solve problems-not just in the airline sector, but also in areas like broadband access, banking and technology platforms.
Stephen Taylor, associate professor of physics and astronomy, was nominated for "The NANOGrav 15-Year Data Set: Evidence for a Gravitational-Wave Background," which was published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. Einstein's theory of general relativity describes how matter and energy warp the fabric of space-time, and the findings of the NANOGrav collaboration demonstrate that gravitational waves, which are ripples in space-time, behave as predicted by Einstein's theory. Taylor led the work and the collaboration that resulted in this groundbreaking evidence of gravitational wave background permeating the universe. Taylor helped lay the foundation for analysis of data from pulsar timing arrays and developed new approaches to limit the search area.
Jamey Young, professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, was nominated for his work detailed in a paper published in Metabolic Engineering, titled "INCA 2.0: A Tool for Integrated, Dynamic Modeling of NMR- and MS-based Isotopomer Measurements and Rigorous Metabolic Flux Analysis." Young's lab develops engineering approaches to measure, understand and control metabolism-the network of chemical reactions within our cells. In 2014 he released a computational tool called INCA for metabolic analysis, which became widely used to model data and quantify the flow of atoms inside living cells. INCA 2.0 is a significant advancement that integrates data from mass spectrometry and nuclear magnetic resonance within a single model to analyze and interpret cellular metabolism. It is helping develop a deeper understanding of cellular function and its implications in health and diseases such as type 2 diabetes, obesity and liver disease.
The Earl Sutherland Prize for Achievement in Research, Vanderbilt's most prestigious faculty honor for achievement in research, was presented to Dan Roden, professor of medicine. Roden's pioneering work focuses on leveraging genetic information to enhance health care outcomes. He has made significant contributions to the genomics of cardiovascular diseases and to pharmacogenomics, which studies how individual genetics influence responses to therapeutic drugs.
His groundbreaking discoveries demonstrating that the same medication can produce different effects in different patients have illuminated the importance of personalized medicine, which tailors treatments to the individual based on factors such as genetic makeup. Vanderbilt is now a leader in personalized medicine, largely due to the nationally recognized biobank BioVU, founded by Roden. BioVU has set Vanderbilt apart by providing a robust toolkit for researchers to explore human biology through an unbiased, real-world dataset, yielding invaluable insights into human diseases.
