School for Science and Math at Vanderbilt

Wow, what an incredible Joint Retreat! Full download later, but Class of 2028 and Class of 2029 absolutely crushed it!! Presentations, posters, trivia, kickball, field day, a trip to TSU, and STEM in Art - we did it all 🥳

It’s Joint Retreat week and you know what that means - science AND a little friendly competition!

🥳 Congrats to Research I and their victory in yesterday’s kickball game!

📊 Today, we’re excited to hear Research I project presentations. They’ve worked on projects designed to better understand Harpeth River Soil Health and Enzymatic Activity in Yeast.

Next up in the competition: Trivia!

We have officially wrapped up Week 2 of the summer session at SSMV!

Our rising juniors and seniors have been hard at work conducting research at SSMV and in Vanderbilt laboratories.

Some students are becoming honey experts! Studying how different honey types, including Manuka honey and locally produced Nashville wildflower honey, affect bacterial growth. Others are isolating and examining pollen from locally produced Nashville honey under a microscope. Another team is using the regenerative properties of planaria to model wound healing and explore how Manuka honey influences regeneration.

Along the way, students are developing valuable research skills in microscopy, wet lab techniques, and image analysis to measure cell growth in regenerating planaria.

📸 Planaria photo by rising junior student Miles Fowler (scale bar = 2 cm)

📸 Image analysis software photos by rising junior Rickyah Ammons

We are excited to welcome back our rising sophomore class on June 8 and kick off Week 3 of the summer session at the SSMV!

We’d like to congratulate SSMV class of 2021 alum, Aleyna Loughran-Pierce, for a recent paper in Nature Ecology & Evolution that she co-authored with her SSMV research internship faculty advisor Dr. Nicole Creanza and mentor Dr. Kate Snyder! This paper is the result of a project Aleyna began in Dr. Creanza’s lab as a high school junior.

This week, we welcomed back the class of 2028 to jump into work on their small group research projects! Teams are studying a variety of topics - from the regenerative and antimicrobial properties of honey, to the songs that plants make through electrical communication, to how road temperature changes with surface material. These rising juniors will present posters on their research projects at our joint symposium in a few weeks!

Another year, another trip to the Tennessee State Museum! We always enjoy the opportunity to learn about the history of STEM in the state of TN.

As we anxiously await photos from our Class of 2026 graduation ceremony, we’d like to extend another round of congratulations to the SSMV’s most recent group of graduates. We’ll have the official photos up for ya soon, but in the meantime, please enjoy the AWESOME sweatshirts designed to showcase an icon representative of their research internship experience 🐧🦇🧠🧬🧫

This week, freshman students made progress on their research projects by testing how acidity, salinity, or temperature affect catalase activity in yeast. Dr. Shakeera Walker guided students in practicing how to make meaning of a lab protocol and collect data from a spectrophotometer, which is a specialized device that measures how much light passes through a liquid. Inquiry-based labs like this one help students learn science practices alongside an understanding of experiment design and structure. Students will present their results and what they’ve learned this summer at our Joint Retreat Symposium!

Fifty projects and sixty-four students from Vanderbilt Collaborative for STEM Education and Outreach (CSEO) program partnerships with Metro Nashville Public Schools competed at the Middle Tennessee Science and Engineering Fair om Friday, March 27th.

Seven seniors from the School for Science and Math at Vanderbilt presented the results from their summer research internships, which they conducted in Vanderbilt University research labs via the SSMV. We are excited to announce the following award recipients from the 2026 MTSEF:

🔹Madeleine McLean - 3rd Place MTSEF Biochemistry, 1st Place American Chemical Society
🔹Hudson Mills - 1st Place MTSEF Physics & Astronomy
🔹Immanual Ojetola - 3rd Place MTSEF Materials Science, Chemours High School Award
🔹Shubh Patel - 1st Place MTSEF Engineering Technology: Statics & Dynamics, Alternate Grand Prize, and Chemours High School Award
🔹Quinn Weiler - 3rd Place MTSEF Biomedical Engineering

If you're wondering what our SSMV seniors have been up to this spring, wonder no further! Seniors spend their spring semester at the SSMV working on Community Engaged Research Projects, so they are out and about making an impact across middle TN and beyond. One student group is collecting and studying soil samples from a pollinator garden in collaboration with the , and another group is leading STEAM activities with middle schoolers in collaboration with and . We're looking forward to sharing the other projects our seniors are working on before graduation!