Spring 2021
Losses
Mar. 19, 2021—Dixon L. Bieri, MD’56, died Nov. 29, 2020. He was 90. Alan L. Bisno, MD, HS’65, died Aug. 10, 2020. He was 84. John W. Boldt, BA’51, MD’54, HS’59, died Oct. 24, 2020. He was 91. Dennis Bonner, MD’83, died Jan. 4. He was 63. Raymond Karl Bopp, MD’56, died June 2, 2020. He was...
Class Notes
Mar. 19, 2021—1940s Milton Caster, MD’49, FACS, is a retired general surgeon who currently lives in Florida. Throughout his career, Caster was president of Broward County Medical Association in Fort Lauderdale and chief of Surgery in multiple hospitals. Caster’s three sons and seven grandchildren have degrees (including two MDs and three JDs) from 18 different universities, and...
Giving in Action: Eskind Chair to support autism research
Mar. 19, 2021—Donna and Jeffrey Eskind, whose generous gifts have advanced Vanderbilt research that is improving lives, have made a new commitment of $2 million to endow a new chair in autism spectrum disorder research in the School of Medicine. This investment will enable Vanderbilt to recruit or retain a senior expert in an area of research...
Giving in Action: Honoring family and the value of education
Mar. 19, 2021—Laura Webb Lamps, MD’92, HS, FE, is quick to describe what made her medical school experience special: the people. “The faculty really set the bar for caring, and our class followed suit. If someone wasn’t in class, a peer or a professor would follow up to check on that person.” In her second year of...
Letter from Ann Price, MD
Mar. 19, 2021—Dear Vanderbilt Medical Alumni: While 2020 was a very difficult year for our entire country, I am eager to see what the new year will bring. Hopefully, the vaccine rollout will proceed smoothly, and all of you will have access by the time this edition of Vanderbilt Medicine arrives at your homes. Due to...
Alumni Profile: Richard Hatchett, MD’95, BA’89
Mar. 19, 2021—Viruses, vaccines and VUSM influences Richard Hatchett, MD’95, grew up along the Gulf Coast of Alabama. Although he had no medical role models in his family or an understanding of what being a physician entailed, he says medicine appealed to him intuitively as a vocation that would reconcile his strong commitments to the sciences and...
Keeping our eyes on the future
Mar. 19, 2021—The COVID-19 pandemic is teaching us many lessons in health care. Among them, we are learning the importance of adapting to change as well as leading change in how we discover, train and heal as we plan for the future. The hesitancy about the two mRNA COVID-19 vaccines is but one example — a technology...
Large study finds higher burden of acute brain dysfunction for COVID-19 ICU patients
Mar. 19, 2021—COVID-19 patients admitted to intensive care in the early months of the pandemic were subject to a significantly higher burden of delirium and coma than is typically found in patients with acute respiratory failure. Choice of sedative medications and curbs on family visitation played a role in increasing acute brain dysfunction for these patients. That’s...
Medical student addresses food needs during pandemic
Mar. 19, 2021—Stephanie Hart, a third-year student in Vanderbilt University’s School of Medicine, is partnering with Cole Elementary School to help fight food insecurity in the Nashville community during the COVID-19 pandemic. When schools across the country closed in March 2020, many children did not get the meals they normally received during the school day. Hart knew...
Research Roundup
Mar. 19, 2021—Polymer protection for heart muscle Following an ischemic event that disrupts oxygen supply to the heart, such as myocardial infarction or cardiac arrest, the return of blood flow can result in additional cellular injury, known as reperfusion injury. Studies have suggested that Poloxamer 188 (P188), a polymer with hydrophobic and hydrophilic chemical properties, can stabilize cell...
Teamwork in the time of COVID
Mar. 19, 2021—Amid many adjustments to learning and teaching during the early days of COVID-19, Vanderbilt University School of Medicine’s interprofessional approach has endured.The Vanderbilt Program in Interprofessional Learning (VPIL), for example, continues in its effort to bring students in nursing, medicine, pharmacy and social work together in an authentic learning environment that prepares them for collaboration...
Alum named chair of Pathology, Microbiology and Immunology
Mar. 19, 2021—After an extensive national search Alice Coogan, MD’88, interim chair of the Department and professor of Pathology, Microbiology and Immunology (PM&I), was named as the department’s next chair. Coogan is the seventh chair of the department and the first female chair. Coogan, who is also executive medical director of Anatomic Pathology at Vanderbilt University Medical Center,...
New bone-anchored hearing implant enhances patient’s life
Mar. 19, 2021—Although Elisabeth Mouw, 23, knew she would benefit from having a bone-anchored hearing implant, she put off getting one for several years. Aside from being concerned about the aesthetic of wearing an external hearing device, she was worried it would interfere with her ability to play sports. Mouw was born with a cholesteatoma, a cyst...
Living liver donor program performs first transplant
Mar. 19, 2021—Tammy Burnett’s life was threatened by cirrhosis of the liver and she desperately needed a transplant. She got on the waiting list at multiple centers, but feared she might die because of the limited supply of matching livers from deceased donors, which could take years to arrive, if ever. Last year, Burnett learned about the...
Feeling like a fraud
Mar. 19, 2021—“They must not know I’m from Queens.” Maureen Gannon, PhD, was in a hotel room in Sweden, talking on the phone with her sister in New York. At the time, Gannon was a new faculty member at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, and she had been invited to give a presentation at an international conference...
Next level data delivery
Mar. 19, 2021—“I want to change the world, not just at Vanderbilt.” In October 2019, in the course of delivering an online seminar sponsored by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Paul Harris, PhD, casually included this aspiration. His talk was part of a series of NIH “webinars” examining how to involve more hospitals and health systems...
Allied forces
Mar. 19, 2021—When Danielle Holt, MD, FACS, began a new job in 2019 as the chief of the Department of Surgery at Blanchfield Army Community Hospital (BACH) at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, she said it felt like coming home. Holt, a lieutenant colonel in the Medical Corps of the United States Army, is a 2005 graduate of Vanderbilt...
Cultivating hope
Mar. 19, 2021—Jackie Hill had taught early childhood education at Chattanooga State Community College for 24 years when her students noticed something troubling. She was giving them the same assignments repeatedly, or she’d give them the wrong assignment. There were other indications, too, said her longtime friend and life partner Ivan O’Neal. In 2011, Hill traveled with...
World Leader in Heart Transplants
Mar. 19, 2021—
Q + A: William Schaffner, MD
Mar. 19, 2021—William Schaffner, MD, professor of Preventive Medicine in the Department of Health Policy and professor of Medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases, is the reassuring face and voice of reliable, relatable and real-time facts about infectious diseases. Over the past year he has conducted thousands of media interviews about COVID-19. Q. How did you...
Faces and Places
Mar. 19, 2021—
Dustin and Dana Hipp
Mar. 19, 2021—Members of the VUSM class of 2013 Dustin is an assistant professor of Pediatrics, critical care medicine, and Dana completed a fellowship in child and adolescent psychiatry. They recently moved back to Nashville where they are raising their three daughters. Photography by Donn Jones
Genes and Alzheimer’s Resilience
Mar. 19, 2021—There are several examples in medicine where people are resilient to a disease — when they are exposed to the disease but don’t show any symptoms. There are people, for example, who carry a rare genetic mutation that prevents HIV from infiltrating cells. These individuals also exist in the world of Alzheimer’s disease — those...
Vanderbilt receives $20 million from The William K. Warren Foundation to further treatments for brain disorders
Mar. 19, 2021—Vanderbilt University received $20 million from The William K. Warren Foundation, located in Tulsa, Oklahoma, to establish the Warren Center for Neuroscience Drug Discovery. The Warren Center for Neuroscience Drug Discovery, led by director Craig Lindsley, PhD, currently includes approximately 100 renowned scientists with a diverse set of interests and skills working to translate essential...
Research rooted in family tree
Mar. 19, 2021—For Angela Jefferson, PhD, who heads the Vanderbilt Memory and Alzheimer’s Center (VMAC), Alzheimer’s disease is both an academic and personal passion. “I’ve dedicated my career to fighting Alzheimer’s disease, to finding effective prevention and therapies, but this fight is also very personal. Both of my grandmothers were affected,” said Jefferson, who joined the Vanderbilt...