Vanderbilt University

Astrobiology Institute and Chairman of the SpaceX Safety Advisory Panel G. Scott Hubbard, Mendel L. Peterson, "the father of underwater archaeology", John Ridley Stroop, who discovered the Stroop effect, and NASA astronauts Michael L. Gernhardt and Charles R. Chappell.
Vanderbilt graduates in medicine have pioneered and attained several "firsts" within their fields, including Norman Shumway, first to perform a successful heart transplant in the United States, Levi Watkins, first to successfully implant an automatic defibrillator in a human patient, Mildred T. Stahlman, founder of the first NICU, James Tayloe Gwathmey, the "Father of Modern Anesthesia," and Ernest William Goodpasture, who invented methods for growing viruses and rickettsiae, enabling the development of vaccination.
Alumni have made significant contributions to literature. Most notably, the Southern Agrarians and Fugitive Poets were two overlapping groups of influential American poets and writers in the early 1900s based at Vanderbilt. Three US …