Twenty-eight retiring faculty members were recognized during Vanderbilt’s Commencement ceremony May 8, when the university honored their years of service and bestowed on them the title of emeritus or emerita faculty.
Jorge H. Capdevila, professor of medicine, emeritus
Capdevila earned a biochemistry degree from the University of Chile in 1969 and a Ph.D. from the University of Georgia in 1974. He completed postdoctoral work at both the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, and Southwestern Medical School in Dallas, Texas. He joined Vanderbilt’s School of Medicine in 1986 as an associate professor in the departments of medicine and biochemistry. He was promoted to professor in 1991. His studies contributed to the discovery and establishment of the arachidonate mono-oxygenase system as a metabolic pathway, the identification of many of its biological functions, the definition of its roles in the regulation of systemic blood pressures, and its relevance to the pathophysiology of hypertension. In recognition of his contributions to the study of the molecular bases of hypertension, he was named a fellow of the American Heart Association in 2002 and awarded the association’s prestigious Novartis Award for Hypertension Research in 2004. He served as program director of a multi-center project dedicated to the study of renal physiology and pathophysiology that received uninterrupted federal funding for 28 years. He has co-authored more than 190 research publications in high-quality journals and holds several U.S. patents on the functional roles of the cytochrome P450 arachidonic acid mono-oxygenase. He has served as a member of scientific review groups for the National Institutes of Health and the American Heart Association. While at Vanderbilt, he participated in the training of several pre- and postdoctoral fellows and in teaching efforts in the Department of Biochemistry.
Cheryl M. Coffin, professor of pathology, microbiology and immunology, emerita
Coffin received her A.B. from Bowdoin College and her M.D. from the University of Vermont. She completed an internship and residency in anatomic and clinical pathology and a fellowship in surgical pathology at the University of Minnesota. She was the Ernest W. Goodpasture Professor of Investigative Pathology for Translational Research, vice chair for anatomic pathology, and director of translational research in the Department of Pathology, Microbiology and Immunology at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. Before joining VUSM, she had faculty appointments at the University of Utah, the University of Minnesota, Brown University and Washington University. She is recognized internationally for her expertise in surgical and soft tissue pathology. Her research has focused on clinical and translational studies of benign and malignant soft tissue tumors in children and young adults. She was lead editor and co-author of two landmark texts, Pediatric Soft Tissue Tumors and Soft Tissue Tumors in Children and Adolescents. In 2002 and 2012, she served on consensus panels for the World Health Organization Classification of Bone and Soft Tissue Tumors. She has authored more than 250 peer-reviewed publications, reviews and book chapters and has been active in a number of professional pathology organizations, including president of the International Pediatric Pathology Association from 2010 to 2012 and the current president-elect of the Society for Pediatric Pathology.
Janie Daddario, associate professor of nursing, emerita
Daddario received a bachelor’s degree in nursing from Villanova University, a master’s in nursing from Boston University and a post-master’s certificate in women’s health from Vanderbilt. She started her career at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in 1980 as a clinical nurse specialist for labor and delivery and post-partum. She became a faculty member at the School of Nursing in 1983. She is a certified women’s health nurse practitioner and an adult nurse practitioner. She is an associate professor of nursing and the former director of the Women’s Health Nurse Practitioner Program, having served in the role for 19 years. She was instrumental in the transition from the clinical nurse specialist role to the advanced nurse practice focus in women’s health for the M.S.N. program. She helped grow the women’s health specialty from an initial enrollment of five students to the current consistent enrollment of 30 specialty year students. She has received numerous awards for teaching and other professional contributions. She has a significant number of authored and co-authored book chapters, manuals and articles in the areas of high-risk/critical-care obstetrics and women’s health. She has served as a member of the committee to develop standards of practice and education for women’s health nurse practitioners and in leadership roles for the National Association of Nurse Practitioners in Women’s Health.
Connie Vinita Dowell, dean of libraries, emerita
Dowell received her master of library science degree from Peabody College in 1979 and returned to Vanderbilt as the university’s first dean of libraries in 2009. Prior to her Vanderbilt appointment, she served as dean of library and information access at San Diego State University and as Connecticut College’s vice president for information services/chief information officer. Under her leadership, Vanderbilt’s Central Library was enhanced with renovations and newly created spaces for student use and new Special Collections exhibit galleries and spaces, for which the library was awarded Gold Certification from the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design. She also sponsored a number of services and programs for students, including the Dean’s Fellows Program, which offers intensive funded learning opportunities for a select group of undergraduate and graduate students. In 2014, she was awarded the Stephen A. Caldwell Award for Student Service by Vanderbilt Student Government. She is a three-time recipient of the John Cotton Dana Public Relations Award from the American Library Association, and in 2008, she received the SirsiDynix–American Library Association–Allied Professional Association Award for outstanding achievement in promoting salaries and status for library workers. In addition, she has served on numerous boards and regional and national committees.
Esther Eisenberg, professor of obstetrics and gynecology, emerita
Eisenberg received her undergraduate degrees from SUNY–Stony Brook and CUNY–Queens and her medical degree from Albert Einstein College of Medicine. She completed residency training at the Tufts Affiliated Obstetrics and Gynecology Program in Boston and fellowship training at the University of Pennsylvania. She earned a master’s of public health at Vanderbilt. Following her fellowship, she joined the faculty of Pennsylvania Hospital, where she developed an operationalized in-vitro fertilization program, one of the first in the United States. In addition to in-vitro fertilization, her research has involved endometriosis and menopause. She has been a co-investigator on several large R01 grants with Dr. Kevin Osteen on endometriosis and has led several studies in the NICHD Reproductive Medicine Network that demonstrated the superiority of letrozole compared with clomiphene for ovulation induction in women with polycystic ovary syndrome. She has served important roles in the development of the curriculum in reproductive endocrinology and infertility for residents and medical students at Vanderbilt. She is an active member of the American Society of Reproductive Medicine and has served on the Committee of Gynecologic Practice of the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology, advising on committee opinions and technical bulletins that are published for members of ACOG as guidelines for clinical practice. She has served on the editorial board of Fertility and Sterility for more than 15 years and written extensively and broadly on reproductive endocrinology, infertility and gynecology, including a book titled Hysterectomy: Exploring Your Options, now in its second edition. For the past six years, she has represented Vanderbilt while working part-time at the National Institutes of Health as a project scientist for the Reproductive Medicine Network, a large multicenter clinical trials network that studies infertility.
Marilyn Friedman, W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy, Emerita
Friedman held the W. Alton Jones Chair in Philosophy from 2009 to 2015. She was recruited to Vanderbilt as the top choice of a committee that looked for the best political philosopher also working in feminist philosophy in the world. She is an internationally renowned expert on care ethics. She taught a very popular course for the Honors Program on the subject of happiness as well as undergraduate courses in political philosophy and ethics. Her graduate teaching in feminist ethics and political philosophy also has been popular, and she is just finishing directing two doctoral dissertations in this area. Her service to the university includes co-directing an interdisciplinary workshop program in social and political thought in which more than 100 faculty members and graduate students from a wide variety of disciplines have participated. She is the author of several books widely regarded as some of the best in feminist political philosophy, including What Are Friends For? (Cornell University Press), Political Correctness: For and Against (with Jan Narveson), and Autonomy, Politics, Feminism (Oxford University Press). She also is the author of a very well-known monograph, Care and Context in Moral Reasoning, which set her reputation in the field. She is the author of 44 articles and a frequent speaker at international and national conferences. This year, she was included as one of 52 scholars, only 10 of whom were women, in the German Philosophischer Kalender devoted to the best writings on friendship, which included Plato and Aristotle, Foucault and Arendt, Hegel and Freud, Nietzsche and Hobbes, and Woolf and Derrida, as well as a selection from her writings. She has won grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities three times and an award for graduate student mentoring twice.
Robert L. Galloway, professor of biomedical engineering, emeritus; professor of neurological surgery, emeritus; and professor of surgery, emeritus
Galloway received a bachelor’s degree from Duke University in 1977, a master’s from the University of Virginia in 1979 and a Ph.D. from Duke in 1983, all in biomedical engineering. In December 1984, he came to Vanderbilt as a postdoctoral fellow in pulmonary medicine and obtained teaching responsibilities in the combined biomedical/electrical engineering department, becoming a research assistant professor of electrical and biomedical engineering until 1988. In 1987, he was appointed an assistant professor of neurological surgery and assistant professor of biomedical engineering. He was promoted to associate professor of biomedical engineering and neurological surgery in 1993 and professor of biomedical engineering, neurological surgery and surgery in 2000. He is one of the pioneers in the field of image-guided surgery. He is the author of more than 230 refereed publications, abstracts and proceedings. He holds 12 patents. He is part of a team of researchers that developed the Vanderbilt Image-Guided Neurosurgery System, which has moved from laboratory to clinical application to commercial development. In 2004, he founded Pathfinder Therapeutics, the premier image-guided abdominal surgery company. During his tenure at Vanderbilt, he has won the School of Engineering Teaching Award, the Mortar Board (senior honor society) Professor of the Year Award, the Vanderbilt Engineering Research Award, the Madison Sarratt Prize for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, the Engineering Council Professor of the Year Award and the Tau Beta Pi (engineering honor society) Award for Teaching Excellence. He has directed 17 master’s and 18 doctoral students. The American Institute for Medical and Biologic Engineering elected him a fellow in 2001, and in 2008, he was elected a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers. In addition, the Pratt School of Engineering at Duke named him a distinguished alumnus in 2010.
Neil E. Green, professor of orthopaedic surgery and rehabilitation, emeritus
Green received his B.A. from Franklin and Marshall College and his M.D. from Albany Medical College. He did his internship and residency training in general and orthopaedic surgery at Duke University. His one-year fellowship training in pediatric orthopaedics was completed at North Carolina Orthopaedic Hospital. He has excelled in the academic world in terms of teaching, mentoring and scholarship. This is in conjunction with his excellence as the premier children’s orthopaedic surgeon in our region. He has authored approximately 80 peer-reviewed publications, written multiple book chapters and is the founding editor of the premier textbook on skeletal trauma in children, currently in its fifth edition. He has achieved national and international acclaim serving on many Vanderbilt University Medical Center and Children’s Hospital committees. He has been a member of the board of directors of the American Orthopaedic Association and served as president of the Nashville Junior League, the American Board of Orthopaedic Surgery, the Pediatric Orthopaedic Society of North America, the Russell Hibbs Society, the Southern Orthopaedic Association, the Tennessee Orthopaedic Society and the Twentieth Century Orthopaedic Association. The Neil E. Green Endowed Chair in Pediatric Orthopaedics was established in his honor, in part through the contributions of his many devoted students and mentees, a testimony to his educational skills.
Stephen P. Heyneman, professor of international education policy, emeritus
Heyneman was appointed professor of international education policy in July 2000. Over the last 14 years, he has built a reputation at Vanderbilt for scholarship in four new areas: international trade in education services, education misconduct and corruption, the contribution of schools and universities to social cohesion, and the variation across countries in the influences of socioeconomic status on student education performance. This latter area is known as the Heyneman/Loxley Effect. He initiated graduate programs at the master’s and doctoral levels in International Education Policy and Management and has served as the coordinator of other faculty and the 40 students in those programs. Today, Vanderbilt IEPM graduates can be found in well-known education consultant firms and think tanks, the World Bank, several agencies of the United Nations, and the U.S. government. He has initiated courses in organizations and social cohesion, education in sub-Saharan Africa, international innovations in higher education policy reform, international innovations in K-12 policy reform, international organizations and economic development, and education and economic development. Locally, he presented his international findings to the Nashville Metropolitan School Board and the Education Committee of the Tennessee State Legislature. He has been asked to assist foundations, governments and individual institutions and has addressed education problems in 65 countries on policies governing world-class universities, educational integrity, international tests of academic achievement, the contribution of education to democracy, the education policy role of the World Bank, and the future of education foreign assistance. He has lectured at universities in 14 countries and was the sole non-citizen to serve on the Canadian Chairs Selection Committee, which allocates federal research funds to universities in Canada. He is a regular reviewer of articles in a dozen academic journals and currently serves as the editor in chief of the International Journal of Educational Development.
Iekuni Ichikawa, professor of pediatrics, emeritus
Ichikawa received his medical and research training at Keio and Kitasato universities in Japan. He did fellowship training at the University of California–San Francisco and Harvard University. He was assistant director of the Laboratory of Kidney and Electrolyte Physiology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston before joining the Vanderbilt faculty in 1985, where he served as director of the Division of Pediatric Nephrology from October 1985 to 1999. Under his direction, the division and the department gained national recognition for basic investigation. He has made important contributions to nephrology, physiology and developmental biology using techniques ranging from micropuncture to targeted gene deletions to study glomerular and tubular physiology, the role of proteinuria in the progression of glomerulosclerosis and the impact of ACE inhibition in altering the course of this process, and the role of angiotensin in renal development and glomerulosclerosis. He has been granted two patents for his unique discoveries. His observations have had an important impact on clinical care, including inhibition of angiotensin II as the mainstay of medical treatment of chronic kidney disease. His work on renal development has become standard teaching, including coining the term “congenital anomalies of the kidney and urinary tract.” He was the principal investigator for the first Pediatric Nephrology Center of Excellence funded by the National Institutes of Health. This grant was continuously funded for 20 years. He has trained and mentored numerous fellows and junior faculty who have become investigators and clinical faculty around the world, including at Vanderbilt. He has held leadership positions in national and international nephrology associations.
Jeremy J. Kaye, professor of radiology and radiological sciences, emeritus
Kaye received a B.S. from the University of Notre Dame and an M.D. from Cornell University Medical College. After an internship in medicine at Bellevue Hospital, he trained in diagnostic radiology at the New York Hospital–Cornell Medical Center. On completion of his residency, he served in the United States Army, rising to the rank of major. After completing his military service in 1971, he returned to Cornell and the Hospital for Special Surgery as an assistant professor of radiology, a position he held until 1976, when he was first recruited to Vanderbilt. He rose through the academic ranks at Vanderbilt, becoming an associate professor in 1976 and a professor in 1980 and going from section chief to division head. In 1988, he returned to Cornell as director of the Department of Radiology at the Hospital for Special Surgery, part of Cornell Medical Center. He was recruited back to Vanderbilt in 2000 as professor of radiology and radiological sciences and vice chair of the department. In 2007, he was named the Carol D. and Henry P. Pendergrass Professor and chair of the department of radiology and radiological sciences, a position he held until 2012, when he decided to step down as chair but continue working in the department. He has written more than 100 scientific publications and six books, given more than 500 invited lectures nationally and internationally, and been a visiting professor at more than 70 prestigious academic medical centers. He is a member of numerous scientific societies and a past president of the International Skeletal Society, for which he previously served as assistant secretary and treasurer. Additionally, he served on the board of trustees of the society’s endowment fund for more than a decade and was chairman of the board for three years. In 2010, the International Skeletal Society presented him with the Founder’s Medal, its highest award. He was the editor of Skeletal Radiology for 11 years and served as associate editor of Radiology for five years. He has been an examiner for the American Board of Radiology since 1979 and has received three Distinguished Service Awards from the American Board of Radiology. In 2013, he was awarded the Lifetime Service Award from the American Board of Radiology.
Douglas A. Knight, Drucilla Moore Buffington Professor of Hebrew Bible, Emeritus
Knight earned his doctorate at the University of Göttingen in Germany and came to Vanderbilt in 1973, becoming the school’s first appointment with the nomenclature “Hebrew Bible” rather than “Old Testament.” The title foreshadowed his vision to move the area from earlier “confessional” approaches toward more critical approaches in the field. For more than four decades, his research has shaped the field of Hebrew Bible, while his teaching and service have both contributed to the life of Vanderbilt Divinity School and built the Hebrew Bible program into one of the most respected in the world. Beginning in the early 1970s, he convened scholars across the field to produce major volumes that focused on theory and method in biblical interpretation, particularly in ethics, history of biblical interpretation, social history and ideological criticism. His first book, Rediscovering the Traditions of Israel, first published in 1973 and now in its third edition, opened a new area of exploration in the discipline. His most recent book, Law, Power and Justice in Ancient Israel (2011), promises a similar impact. He has edited 33 books, most of them in the four prestigious series for which he served as editor: the Society of Biblical Literature Dissertation Series, Issues in Religion and Theology, The Bible and Its Modern Interpreters, and the acclaimed Library of Ancient Israel. As the longest-serving faculty member in the history of the Hebrew Bible area at the university, he has been principally responsible for building a program that produced a distinctly “Vanderbilt” school in biblical scholarship, including 34 scholars whose doctoral dissertations he directed, many of whom are now counted among the most important in the field. He held a secondary appointment as professor of Jewish studies in the College of Arts and Science and was an affiliated faculty member in the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages. He served as chair of the Graduate Department of Religion, as co-director and senior fellow of the Center for the Study of Religion and Culture from 2003 to 2009, as chair of the Divinity School faculty, as acting dean of the Divinity School, and as chair of the Hebrew Bible area for 20 years. His work has received major awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fulbright Program, the National Science Foundation and the Association of Theological Schools. In 2005, he won Vanderbilt’s Thomas Jefferson Award.
David E. McCauley, professor of biological sciences, emeritus
McCauley earned his B.S. in zoology from the University of Maryland–College Park in 1972 and his Ph.D. in ecology and evolution from SUNY–Stony Brook in 1976. He took a position as a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Chicago from 1976 to 1979 and his first faculty position at the University of Virginia in 1979. He came to Vanderbilt in 1980 as an assistant professor in the Department of General Biology, where one of his first duties was to create an undergraduate evolution course and later, a biostatistics course. Both of these have become core elements of the department’s curriculum. He became an associate professor in 1986 and a professor in 1994. His research has focused on population and evolutionary genetics of plants and insects and on organellar genomes. His laboratory has been continuously funded by federal grants since 1980, and he authored approximately 100 publications in peer-reviewed journals as well as chapters in bound volumes. As a group, his publications have been cited approximately 6,000 times, with nine of the papers being cited more than 100 times. Many of his publications include Vanderbilt undergraduates or graduate students as co-authors and nearly all of his former graduate students and postdoctoral trainees are now tenured or tenure-track faculty themselves. He served as director of undergraduate studies for Biological Sciences twice for multi-year terms. He also served on the College Committee on Individual Programs for almost 20 years, one term on the Faculty Senate, and three times on the committee charged with selecting new members of Phi Beta Kappa. He has been associate editor for the peer-reviewed journals Molecular Ecology, American Naturalist and Journal of Evolutionary Biology. He also served on the National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship Review Panel from 1988 to 1989, the National Science Foundation Population Biology Review Panel from 1990 to 1992, the National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Panel in 1996 and in 2012, and the National Science Foundation Evolutionary Genetics Review Panel in 2009.
Russell M. McIntire Jr., senior lecturer in philosophy, emeritus
McIntire received his B.A. in philosophy from Mississippi College in 1967 and his M.A. and Ph.D. in philosophy from Vanderbilt in 1971 and 1972, respectively, the latter under the direction of professors Charles Scott and John Compton. He taught at Lambuth College in Jackson, Tennessee, for 17 years, earning tenure and the rank of professor and serving as associate dean of the college. He returned to Vanderbilt in 1988 to establish and direct the College of Arts and Science Learning Center, which was charged with creating programs, counseling and tutoring services “to help good students become better learners.” In 1990, he was named assistant dean of special academic programs in the College of Arts and Science and associate dean in 1997. As a lecturer and senior lecturer in philosophy, he has taught introductory courses in philosophy, courses in medical ethics, and a first-year writing seminar in the ethics of death and dying. He consults and writes about the ethics of medicine, with particular attention to the relationships between patients and physicians. During his tenure in the A&S dean’s office, he directed summer sessions, study abroad programs, the honor scholarship program, the College Scholars program and departmental honors programs; inaugurated and directed the Master of Liberal Arts and Science degree program; administered financial aid for graduate students; and served as the liaison for the dean’s office with the Office of Undergraduate Admissions. Through his work with admissions, he welcomed thousands of prospective students and their parents to Vanderbilt and recruited gifted students from all corners of the United States and the world to come to the College of Arts and Science as College Scholars. A former pole-vaulter, he also helps officiate Vanderbilt track and field meets, leads the Kirkland chorus in singing “Happy Birthday” at about two dozen staff birthday celebrations each year, and is an avid and skilled photographer. He retires at the same time as his wife, Suzan, who has served as assistant to the dean at Peabody College.
M. Douglas Meeks, Cal Turner Chancellor’s Professor of Theology and Wesleyan Studies, Emeritus
Meeks received his Ph.D. in 1971 from Duke University after two years as a Fulbright Fellow at Tübingen University in Germany. A prolific scholar, he has published numerous journal articles and book chapters. He has translated several volumes from the German, edited more than eight books, and authored Origins of the Theology of Hope as well as the widely cited and groundbreaking God the Economist, which as been translated into German and Korean. He has held leadership positions in two different program units of the American Academy of Religion and has served on multiple editorial boards for academic journals. In addition, he has been extraordinarily active as an invited lecturer, receiving calls from more than 50 academic institutions all over the United States and in Germany, England, the Republic of Korea, Japan and Brazil. In recognition of his impact as a scholar and teacher, a number of leading theologians are currently collaborating on a Festschrift in his honor. His teaching career has encompassed a period just short of a half-century, beginning at his doctoral institutions; continuing with appointments as professor of systematic theology at Eden Theological Seminary and Wesley Theological Seminary, where he served as dean for eight years; and culminating in his 17 years at Vanderbilt as the inaugural Cal Turner Chancellor’s Professor of Theology and Wesleyan Studies. At Vanderbilt, his teaching has extended far beyond the classroom to include mentoring a generation of United Methodist students at Vanderbilt in their quest for ordination in their community. His course “God, Economy and Poverty” is a model of trans-institutional teaching, enrolling students from across the university. In addition to regular leadership roles within Vanderbilt’s Graduate Department of Religion and on various regular and ad hoc committees of the Divinity School, he served as director of the Turner Center for Church Leadership and Congregational Development, which he helped to establish, and for 25 years as co-chair of the Oxford Institute of Methodist Theological Studies. He has been a member of several commissions of the National Council of Churches and the World Council of Churches. He was for more than two decades chair of the working group relating the United Church of Christ in the United States to the Protestant churches in East Germany. He recently served as president of the American Theological Society.
Geraldine G. Miller, professor of medicine, emerita
Miller received her B.S. in biology from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and her M.D. from the University of California–San Diego. She completed her internship and first year of residency in internal medicine at University Hospital in San Diego, and her second year of residency at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston. She received her postdoctoral fellowship training in infectious diseases and immunology at the National Institutes of Health. She joined the faculty of the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston and then moved to Baylor College of Medicine. She was appointed associate professor of medicine at Vanderbilt in 1991 and promoted to professor of medicine in 1998. Her research interests included mechanisms of allograft rejection, host immune responses to pathogens, and infections in immunocompromised hosts. She has been co-author on 87 peer-reviewed publications. She served for 23 years as the infectious disease consultant for solid organ transplant and hematopoietic stem cell transplant recipients. She also helped initiate the infectious disease clinical consult service at Williamson Medical Center, where she served for five years. Her teaching activities included lectures to medical students, graduate students, fellows and faculty on mechanisms and infectious complications of immunosuppression. She was a research mentor for several post-doctoral fellows. She served on the board of directors of the American Society of Transplantation, several NIH study sections, the Vanderbilt Institutional Review Board, the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine Appointments and Promotions Committee, the Department of Medicine’s Faculty Appointment and Promotions Committee, and the Division of Infectious Disease Fellowship Oversight Committee.
Molly F. Miller, professor of Earth and environmental sciences, emerita
Miller earned her B.A. in geology from the College of Wooster, her M.S. in geology from George Washington University and her Ph.D. from the University of California–Los Angeles. Prior to embarking on her Ph.D., she was a Peace Corps trainee in Africa, an assistant editor of the Bibliography of Geology, a high school Earth science teacher, and a ranger at Bryce Canyon National Park. She joined Vanderbilt as an assistant professor in 1977 and has enriched the experience of students and faculty colleagues ever since. Her scholarly work relates to interactions among animal and plant communities and the soil and sediment that they inhabit. Her most prominent fieldwork was in Antarctica, where she led teams including undergraduates to investigate the record of 250 million-year-old paleoenvironments recorded in the rocks of the Transarctic Mountains and the modern environments at the shoreline and on the ocean floor beneath sea ice. She was the leader of the first all-female, remote site-based field research team in Antarctica in 1984–85, and she sustained her work in this rigorous environment for 30 years. She passionately introduced 5,000 Vanderbilt students to the Earth and how it works through her course “Dynamic Earth,” continually innovating in her content and approach for 35 years. Her creativity in engaging students at all levels is legendary. She punctuates her lectures with novel, often humorous demonstrations, with discussion group exercises, coverage of current events related to the course material and creative field exercises. She often had her “Life Through Time” students bury a variety of organic items such as groceries to examine how materials decompose or are preserved over time. Consistently creating, preparing and conducting effective pedagogical devices of this sort were her ordinary tools of teaching, both for students and through substantive community outreach. For most of her career, she was the public face of her department at Vanderbilt, in Nashville and in professional activities. In addition to supervising graduate student research on an array of topics, she enthusiastically mentored many undergraduate researchers. Many of these students were co-authors on papers that were informed by their work, and many went on to pursue advanced degrees.
Terry L. Page, professor of biological sciences, emeritus
Page earned his B.A. in physics and zoology and M.A. in zoology from the University of Texas at Austin. In 1974, he earned his Ph.D. in zoology from the University of Texas, where he was awarded a National Institutes of Health Pre-doctoral Fellowship. From 1976 to 1980, he was a National Institutes of Health postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, where he worked with Professor Colin Pittendrigh, considered by many to be the founder of modern circadian biology. With Pittendrigh, he developed the cockroach as an experimental circadian system, with which he has been associated ever since. He came to Vanderbilt in 1980 as an assistant professor in the Department of General Biology. He was named associate professor in 1985 and professor in 1991. He served as chair of the then-Department of Biology from 1999 to 2002, as well as chair of the committee that created the undergraduate Interdisciplinary Program in Neuroscience, for which he has been the founding director since 1998. In addition to circadian rhythm, his research has focused on neurobiology and learning and memory. He has been a longtime member of the editorial board of the Journal of Biological Rhythms, Chronobiology International and the Open Entomology Journal. He was awarded the prestigious Honma Prize for Research in Biological Rhythms in Sapporo, Japan, in 1988. His laboratory has been funded by federal grants since 1980, and he authored more than 60 publications that have been cited 1,500 times. Two publications that were particularly influential were his 1982 publication in Science in which he demonstrated successful transplantation of the circadian clock, and his 2007 publication in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA) in which he showed a circadian rhythm in memory retention. Many of the publications included Vanderbilt undergraduate researchers whom he mentored. He is a beloved teacher and adviser of students, having been recognized with the Earnest A. Jones Faculty Advisor Award, the Jeffrey Nordhaus Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching and the Madison Sarratt Prize for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching.
C. Leon Partain, professor of radiology and radiological sciences, emeritus
Partain received his B.S. in nuclear engineering from the University of Tennessee, his M.S. and Ph.D. in nuclear engineering from Purdue University and his M.D. from Washington University. He completed his residency training in diagnostic radiology and nuclear medicine at the University of North Carolina. His career includes a position as a nuclear engineer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He was recruited to the Department of Radiology and Radiological Sciences at Vanderbilt in 1980 and became a professor in 1984. He was named the first Carol D. and Henry P. Pendergrass Professor and Chair. He is clinically trained and certified in diagnostic radiology and nuclear radiology by the American Board of Radiology and the American Board of Nuclear Medicine. His society affiliations include the American College of Radiology, the American College of Nuclear Medicine, the Society of Magnetic Resonance Imaging and the International Society of Magnetic Resonance in Medicine. He served as president of the Radiological Research Alliance of the Association of University Radiologists and has held executive roles as a member of many radiological society boards. He was editor in chief of the Journal of Magnetic Resonance Imaging from 2000 to 2013 and a member of the editorial boards of Magnetic Resonance in Medicine, Magnetic Resonance Imaging, the American Journal of Roentgenology, Academic Radiology, the Journal of Nuclear Medicine and Investigative Radiology. He has authored six textbooks, including the first comprehensive text in nuclear magnetic resonance imaging translated into Japanese in 1983. He also authored 96 book chapters and 200 archival journal articles. He received the Distinguished Service Award from the International Society of Magnetic Resonance in Medicine in 2014 and has served the American Board of Radiology as an examiner for 20 years, the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education as a member of the Nuclear Medicine Residency Review Committee, and Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in multiple capacities.
Matthew D. Ramsey, professor of history, emeritus
Ramsey earned his A.B., A.M. and Ph.D. degrees from Harvard University and was an assistant professor of history there until joining Vanderbilt’s Department of History in 1984. During his careers at Harvard and Vanderbilt, he also was a visiting fellow and faculty member at the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University and a visiting professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. He is best known for his research on the history of medicine and public health, with a particular focus on the professionalization of French medicine during the 18th and 19th centuries. His pioneering book Professional and Popular Medicine in France, 1770-1830: The Social World of Medical Practice (1988) has become a standard point of reference in the field. He has published more than 100 journal articles, book chapters and reviews and has been a very active speaker and consultant in North America and Europe. He served for 14 years on the editorial board of the journal Medical History. His scholarship has been recognized by fellowships and grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Philosophical Society and the National Institutes of Health. Within Vanderbilt’s Department of History, he helped transform the major during his tenures as director of undergraduate studies and director of the Honors Program. Outside the department, he created the multidisciplinary Center for Medicine, Health and Society, which has stimulated research and teaching that crosses traditional boundaries of departments and schools. Its curricular program has produced one of the most vibrant and popular majors in the College of Arts and Science. He also served the university in several key roles, notably in the early planning of the residential college system, now known as College Halls, and as chair of the Faculty Senate. In recognition of his contributions, he received the Thomas Jefferson Award for Distinguished Service in 2007.
Jack M. Sasson, Mary Jane Werthan Professor of Jewish Studies and Hebrew Bible, Emeritus
Sasson joined Vanderbilt in 1999 after a distinguished 33-year career at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill, where he also served as chair of the Department of Religious Studies from 1988 to 1993 and as its William R. Kenan Jr. Professor from 1991 to 1999. He had already published his biblical commentaries to the books of Ruth and Jonah and served as editor in chief of the award-winning four volumes of Civilizations of the Ancient Near East, an unsurpassed reference work for ancient Near Eastern studies. At Vanderbilt, he is an invaluable colleague and teacher in the Hebrew Bible area of the Divinity School and the Graduate Department of Religion and also holds an appointment as a professor of classics in the Department of Classical Studies. He created the Program in Jewish Studies, which he directed from 2002 to 2005. He has maintained an extensive publication record that includes his biblical commentary on the Book of Judges 1–12 for Anchor Bible and the forthcoming From the Mari Archives: Mosaics for an Old Babylonian Culture, a look upon the Mari Archives, for which he is a recognized world authority. He has served on the board of editors of various renowned publications and is widely and extensively published in Journal of the American Oriental Society, Biblische Zeitschrift, Revue d’assyriologie, Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft and Ugarit-Forschungen, just to name a few. For decades, his email list has been invaluable to the scholarly community worldwide, with postings ranging from new discoveries to publications, job listings, awards and obituaries in the fields of Hebrew Bible and ancient Near Eastern studies and beyond. His stature in his field is further demonstrated by the prestigious visiting posts he was offered throughout his career: fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Jerusalem, visiting scholar at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, fellow of the National Humanities Center, and professor at the Collège de France in Paris. Among other honors, he was named president of the American Oriental Society and president of the International Association of Assyriology. In 2014, he was inducted into the prestigious Honorary Council of the International Association of Assyriology. He is currently working on the second volume of his commentary to the Book of Judges (13–21) for Anchor Bible.
Roland Schneller, senior artist teacher of piano, emeritus
Schneller received his bachelor of music from Mount Union College and his master of music from Indiana University. He has been on the Blair School of Music faculty since its founding in 1964 and was the school’s first full-time faculty member. Appointed an assistant professor at Peabody College in 1970, he was part of the Blair leadership team when the school joined Vanderbilt University in 1980. He has served as Chancellor’s Professor of Piano, senior artist teacher of piano, and co-chair of the keyboard department, and he has been chair of the Blair Precollege Scholarship Committee since 1967. For more than 50 years, he has been a distinguished teacher of both precollegiate and Vanderbilt University collegiate students, and his students regularly receive awards and superior ratings in regional, state and area competitions and auditions. Notable former students include Daniel Spaw, conductor at the Linz Opera House in Linz, Austria; Stan Tucker, Broadway conductor, pianist and arranger; Grace Huang, piano faculty at the Cleveland Institute of Music; Jerome Reed, professor of piano at Lipscomb University; James Helton, associate professor of piano at Ball State University; Myong Lee, piano faculty at The Colburn School in Los Angeles; and Roger Wiesmeyer, a faculty member at Blair. Recognized with the Tennessee Governor’s School for the Arts Outstanding Teacher Award many times, he also has been honored as the Nashville Area Music Teachers Association’s Teacher of the Year.
Robert E. Stammer Jr., professor of civil and environmental engineering, emeritus
Stammer earned his bachelor of engineering in civil engineering from Vanderbilt in 1972. In 1988, he was an original founder of VECTOR, the Vanderbilt Center for Transportation Research. His funded research has produced numerous presentations and papers in the areas of highway safety, traffic engineering, transportation systems design and modeling, accident reconstruction and hazardous materials transportation. He has received best technical paper awards from both the Transportation Research Board and the Institute of Transportation Engineers, and he was an author of a transportation engineering text that was the most widely used of its kind at universities for more than a decade. His classes have encouraged many students to become transportation professionals. He has taught introductory courses in transportation engineering, traffic engineering and transportation systems design to advanced graduate courses in mass transit, airports and the theory of traffic flow. He has received teaching awards from the School of Engineering and the Tau Beta Pi Student Chapter recognizing him as one of the engineering school’s best teachers. The Southern District of the Institute of Transportation Engineers, a nine-state professional organization, also awarded him the 2011 Excellence in Transportation Engineering Education Award for his dedication and devotion to transportation engineering education. He served as assistant dean and associate dean of student affairs for the School of Engineering as well as assistant provost for academic affairs in athletics, managing the Academic Support Center for the athletics department. He was director of the Engineering Science Program for more than 24 years. He received the university’s Chancellor’s Cup for outstanding service and the School of Engineering’s Edward J. White Engineering Faculty Outstanding Service Award. In addition, he served three years on the international board of directors for the Institute of Transportation Engineers.
James H. Steiger, professor of psychology, emeritus
Steiger received a bachelor’s degree from Cornell University in 1970, a master’s from the University of Oklahoma in 1972 and a Ph.D. from Purdue University in 1976. He came to Vanderbilt in 2003 as a professor of psychology at Peabody College of education and human development. He is the past director of the Quantitative Methods and Evaluation Program in the Department of Psychology and Human Development. He has contributed to behavioral statistics and psychometric theory in several areas, including factor indeterminacy, its history (with P.H. Schönemann) and implications; methods and software for simultaneous testing of several correlation coefficients; derivation (with M.W. Browne and A. Shapiro) of the multivariate asymptotic distribution of sequential chi-square statistics; development (with R.T. Fouladi) of noncentrality-based confidence intervals and associated software for augmenting and/or replacing traditional hypothesis tests; derivation (with M.W. Browne) of a general procedure for comparing simple, multiple, partial, semi-partial and canonical correlations; and analysis of human factor issues in structural modeling software. Perhaps his best-known contribution is his introduction (with J.C. Lind) of the concept of noncentrality-based fit indices, including the RMSEA, and associated confidence intervals in covariance structure modeling. In addition to serving as an editorial board member and reviewer for a number of academic journals, he was formerly editor of Multivariate Behavioral Research and associate editor of Psychological Methods. As president of the Society of Multivariate Experimental Psychology in 2006, he co-edited (with L.L. Harlow and S.A. Mulaik) the 1997 volume What if There Were No Significance Tests? He has received the Killam Research Prize, the Raymond B. Cattell Award and the Samuel Messick Distinguished Scientific Contributions Award for his work in multivariate statistics and psychometrics.
Richard S. Stein, professor of medicine, emeritus
Stein received his A.B. from Harvard University in 1966 and his M.D. from Harvard Medical School in 1972. He conducted his medical internship and residency at the University of Chicago. He did two fellowships in hematology and in hematology and oncology at Massachusetts General Hospital and the University of Chicago, respectively. After three years as a faculty member at the Medical College of Wisconsin, he was recruited to Vanderbilt as an assistant professor in the Department of Medicine’s Division of Hematology. He was promoted to associate professor in 1980 and professor in 2004. He was director of hematologic malignancies from 1999 to 2010. His research activities have included demonstrating the importance of anatomical sub-staging in Hodgkin lymphoma and the curative potential of high-dose consolidation chemotherapy in acute myelogenous leukemia. In addition to his clinical activities, which he has maintained throughout his Vanderbilt career, he was director from 1985 to 2009 of the required second-year medical school course “Laboratory Diagnosis,” which emphasized a logical approach to clinical problem solving. In 2005, his teaching activities earned him the School of Medicine’s Excellence in Teaching Award. He was a recipient of the Apple Award for Teaching Excellence given by the Division of Hematology and Oncology and the Jack Davies Award for teaching excellence in the lecture setting. He is the author of more than 100 papers in refereed journals. He is also the author of four medically themed novels.
Christian Teal, professor of violin, emeritus
Teal’s musical background includes studies with many renowned artists. During his undergraduate years at Indiana University, he was a pupil of Josef Gingold, followed by graduate study with Dorothy DeLay. He studied chamber music with members of the Juilliard, Hungarian and Berkshire Quartets, as well as with William Primrose, Janos Starker and Gyorgy Sebok. He joined the faculty at Blair School of Music in 1972. He is internationally known through concerts, recordings and radio broadcasts as the first violinist of the Blair String Quartet. His appearances with the quartet have included concerts at the 92nd Street Y, Merkin Hall and Weill Recital Hall in New York, and the Library of Congress, Kennedy Center and National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. His numerous festival appearances include the Aspen Music Festival, the Sedona Chamber Music Festival, the Colorado Music Festival, the Meadowmount School of Music and many occasions at the Music Mountain Summer Music Festival in Connecticut. As a soloist, he has appeared with orchestras nationwide, including the Madeira Bach Festival Orchestra, the Richmond Symphony, the Colorado Philharmonic and the Nashville Symphony Orchestra. On recordings, he can be heard on the Pantheon, Varese Sarabande, Redmark Vox, New World, Warner Brothers and Naxos labels. In the fall of 2006, the Blair String Quartet’s recording of the string quartets of Charles Ives was released by Naxos Records to international critical acclaim. Among the composers whose works he has premiered are George Tsontakis, Morton Subotnick, Béla Fleck, Edgar Meyer, Michael Alec Rose and Michael Kurek. In 2012, the Blair String Quartet performed Images from a Closed Ward, a string quartet by Michael Hersch, at Carnegie Recital Hall in New York, the Peabody Institute of Music in Baltimore, and in Philadelphia.
R. Jay Turner, Harvie Branscomb Distinguished Chair in Sociology, Emeritus
Turner joined Vanderbilt’s Department of Sociology in 2010. Soon after his arrival, he received the Harvie Branscomb Endowed Chair. He also was a professor of psychiatry. He pioneered the cumulative measurement of stress on mental health outcomes, including depressive symptoms, major depressive disorder, substance abuse and alcohol dependence. He was the first to show that the influences of chronic strains on mental health were stronger than one negative event or trauma; that the effects of childhood and adult traumas increased the risk of subsequent stressful events; and, perhaps most importantly, that the cumulative stress burden explains more variation in mental health outcomes than negative events alone. Because of his scholarship, stress exposure is recognized as significant to raising the risks of psychological distress, more so than researchers originally believed. In addition, he has been foremost in verifying the unequal distributions of stress experiences. It is virtually impossible to review studies about the effects of stress on mental health without relying on his extensive contributions to the field. His work at Vanderbilt has explored health disparities. In his latest project, funded by the National Institute of Aging, he argues that measurement problems led to an underestimation of the health consequences of stress exposure, especially among the poor and for minorities who often face challenges to good health and well-being. He uses physiological measures of allostatic load and cell aging as alternative measures of overall physical health. This work establishes the role of stress as a major cause of illness and disability among these populations. Consistent with these interests, he has taught several popular undergraduate courses, including “Medicine and Society” and the “Sociology of Mental Health.”
Conrad Wagner, professor of biochemistry, emeritus
Wagner has served Vanderbilt for more than 50 years. In his post-military professional life, he progressed from his start as a postdoctoral student in the esteemed laboratory of Earl Stadtman to being named assistant professor in 1961, associate professor in 1968 and professor in 1975. He acted as interim chair of the Department of Biochemistry from 1991 to 1992. For more than a half-century, his research in nutritional science has focused on folate, vitamins and one-carbon metabolism compounds. This work has resulted in merit awards, fellowships, invited speakerships, government funding and 170 publications and reviews. He has served Vanderbilt as a member of the University Senate, the Faculty Advisory Council and the Promotions and Graduate Education Committee. He has been an active and influential participant in forming educational policies within the Vanderbilt community. He has been a binding link between Vanderbilt University and the Veteran’s Administration Hospital, encouraging collaboration within that association. He served as chief of the VA Biochemistry Research Unit and as associate chief of staff for research at the VA, all while continuing to run his laboratory at Vanderbilt and publishing scholarly papers. He also ran a core facility on campus. He has been an invited speaker in the United States and abroad and taught classes in California, New York and England over the years. He shared his nutritional expertise by serving on various journal boards. As a teacher and mentor, he has trained numerous students, postdocs, research faculty and staff, one of whom recently donated money to the Department of Biochemistry in honor of Wagner’s influence. He recently facilitated a visiting professorship with a senior investigator from UCLA, another indication of his tangible influence on the biochemistry department.
