What can a fruit fly teach us about MRI quality? 🪰🧠 VALIANT scholar Adam Saunders used a simulation of the fly’s neural wiring to identify problematic MRI scans—catching 93% of failing images in a small held-out test. Read more here: buff.ly/cgZCO2Q

Another achievement worth celebrating! 🎉 Lianrui Zuo has been recognized as an Outstanding Area Chair at MICCAI 2026. Congratulations on this well-deserved distinction! Check out our newsletter here: buff.ly/cgZCO2Q

Congratulations to Brett Byram on receiving an NIH R01 grant for “Improved Ultrasound for Hepatocellular Carcinoma Screening.” This work advances efforts to improve imaging approaches for liver cancer screening. Check out our newsletter here: buff.ly/cgZCO2Q

Congratulations to Jonathan Martin on receiving an NIH K25 grant for “Ultra-Low Field MRI for Assessment of Congenital Heart Disease.” Check out our newsletter here: buff.ly/cgZCO2Q

Dr. Jonathan Martin and his team are building a smarter, faster, and more adaptable ultra-low-field MRI platform after winning the VALIANT Discover AI 2026 PITCH Competition—and the momentum continues with a new NHLBI K25 award. Read more here: buff.ly/cgZCO2Q

BrainHack Vanderbilt 2026 brought researchers, trainees, and collaborators together for three days of open science, hands-on projects, and interdisciplinary discovery—with support from VALIANT. Check out our newsletter here: buff.ly/cgZCO2Q

💜 Big ideas need great connections… and great connections need YOU! ✨ We're hiring an Assistant Director of Strategic Partnerships to help grow our network, spark collaborations, and connect people across academia, industry, and beyond 🔗 Apply here: buff.ly/7Sc1HkE

Congratulations to Yuankai Huo on receiving Vanderbilt’s Chancellor’s Award for Research, recognizing excellence in published research, scholarship, or creative expression. Check out our newsletter here: buff.ly/cgZCO2Q

Big ideas, one stage, 12–15 minutes. 🎤 VALIANT Attempt is launching VALx, a new student-led speaker series where scholars share one cool or novel idea with the wider VALIANT community—TEDx style. Check out our newsletter here: buff.ly/cgZCO2Q

Congratulations to Lianrui Zuo on receiving an NIH K99/R00 grant for research using multimodal AI to accelerate early diagnosis and risk assessment in lung cancer care. Check out our newsletter here: buff.ly/cgZCO2Q

We’re excited to welcome Cornelson Advisory to the VALIANT Industry Affiliate Program! Cornelson Advisory helps investing, finance, and accounting teams put AI to work through practical workflows, connected data, and hands-on training. Read more here: buff.ly/cgZCO2Q

Véronique Belzil, Director of the Vanderbilt ALS Research Center, shares how giving trainees room to lead helps build confident, independent scientists. Check out our newsletter here: buff.ly/cgZCO2Q

✨ Plot twist: our next big connection at VALIANT could be YOU. ✨ We’re hiring an Assistant Director of Strategic Partnerships to help us bring people, ideas, and opportunities together across industry, academia, and beyond. 🤝💡 🔗 Apply today: buff.ly/GYAxrVe

BrainHack Vanderbilt is deepening its partnership with VALIANT, opening more opportunities for undergraduates to build community, develop skills, and contribute at the intersection of collaborative neuroscience, AI, and hacking. Read more here: buff.ly/cgZCO2Q

Fresh research from the VALIANT community! Explore the latest publications that have hit Scopus since last month and see how our researchers are advancing discovery across AI, data science, engineering, and health. Catch up with VALIANT’s latest news: vanderbilt.edu/valiant/2026/…

Ruining Deng, Yuankai Huo, and collaborators have introduced the KPIs Challenge, benchmarking glomerular segmentation using more than 10,000 annotations from 50 kidney whole-slide images. Find this and more in our latest newsletter: vanderbilt.edu/valiant/2026/…

Congratulations to VALIANT scientist Jonathan Martin on receiving an NIH/NHLBI K25 award for his work on ultra-low field MRI for assessing congenital heart disease. This research could help advance new approaches to cardiac imaging. Read more : buff.ly/00TqtbL

What if AI were designed to fit medicine, not the other way around? Vandy researchers are building AI around the realities of biomedical data, from complex anatomy & medical imaging to patient histories & differences across clinical settings. Read more: buff.ly/00TqtbL

VALIANT AI Scholar Mingxing (Ethan) Rao and collaborators are uncovering how training data can leave detectable signals in generative models—offering new insights into AI privacy and security. Learn more in the latest VALIANT newsletter: buff.ly/00TqtbL

📱✨ A VALIANT Attempt at… DIY NFC Tags! Join us for a DIY NFC Tag Workshop and learn how to program and decorate your own NFC tags. 📅 Wednesday, September 16 ⏰ 11:30 a.m. 📍 FGH Study Lounge (across from the auditorium) 🥤 Refreshments provided!