Three Vanderbilt University faculty members have been elected to membership in the Association of American Physicians (AAP), one of the nation’s most respected medical honor societies.
They are Wonder Drake, MD, Jane Freedman, MD, and Stokes Peebles, MD.
They were formally inducted April 9 with other new members during the joint annual meeting of the AAP and American Society for Clinical Investigation (ASCI) in Chicago. They join many other current and emeritus Vanderbilt faculty members who are members of the AAP.
Drake is the Robert A. Goodwin, Jr. Professor of Medicine, professor of Pathology, Microbiology and Immunology and serves as the inaugural director of the Vanderbilt Sarcoidosis Center of Excellence. She conducts basic, clinical and translational investigations of mechanisms by which immune cells drive interstitial lung disease progression, particularly sarcoidosis. Drake earned her MD degree from Vanderbilt (1994), served her internal medicine residency at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine (1997) and completed a fellowship in infectious diseases at Vanderbilt (2001).
She has been elected to the Alpha Omega Alpha Honor Medical Society (2008) and the ASCI (2016). Drake serves as an associate editor of the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine. In addition to having served or chaired NIH LCMI study sections, she currently serves on the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases intramural Board of Scientific Councilors.
Freedman is the Gladys Parkinson Stahlman Professor of Cardiovascular Research and the director of the Division of Cardiovascular Medicine and physician-in-chief of the Vanderbilt Heart and Vascular Institute. Freedman has served as the chair of the National American Heart Association Peer Review Committee and is the current editor-in-chief of Circulation Research.
She has extensive mentoring experience and has been the previous PI of two T32 Training Grants. She oversees two research programs — a basic science laboratory that examines the role of immunity, infection, and inflammation on atherothrombotic disease and high-throughput core studying transcriptomic and proteomic data, nano-chip, and RNA-seq technologies to study gene expression and provide large scale transcriptomic and proteomic translational data for a wide range of clinical and translational projects. Freedman earned her MD degree from Tufts University in 1989, served her residency in internal medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital (1991), and was a research fellow in medicine at Harvard Medical School, a clinical fellow in cardiology at Brigham & Women’s Hospital and a clinical fellow in medicine at Harvard Medical School.
Peebles is the Elizabeth and John Murray Professor of Medicine, professor of Pathology, Microbiology, and Immunology, section chief and associate fellowship training program director, Allergy/Immunology. He received his MD from Vanderbilt in 1986, was a resident in internal medicine at Vanderbilt, and was elected to the Alpha Omega Alpha Honor Medical Society. Peebles performed a four-year fellowship in allergy/clinical immunology at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine (1991-1995) and then returned to Vanderbilt where he completed a three-year fellowship in pulmonary/- critical care medicine (1995-1998). He is board certified in internal medicine, allergy/immunology, pulmonary and critical care. Peebles has an active research program examining the role of eicosanoids in allergic and virally induced lung inflammation.
