Laboratory and administrative personnel at Vanderbilt University Medical Center were honored on March 29 for research excellence during the 20th annual Research Staff Awards Ceremony at the Aertson Hotel in Nashville.
Presenting the awards were Jennifer Pietenpol, PhD, Chief Scientific & Strategy Officer and Executive Vice President for Research at VUMC, and John Kuriyan, PhD, Dean of Basic Sciences, Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, which sponsors the awards.
“Over the past decade, Vanderbilt’s School of Medicine research enterprise has grown tremendously,” Pietenpol said in her introductory remarks.
“Without the dedication and service of research staff like these honorees, we would not be making and advancing discoveries to patients and community, training future scientists, continuing to achieve remarkable grant funding, blazing trails through research, helping to change the practice of medicine and defining public policy,” she said.
The awards and the 2023 recipients are:
- The Vivien T. Thomas Award for Excellence in Clinical Research — Lauren LeStourgeon, MPH, senior clinical research data specialist in the Division of General Internal Medicine and Public Health.
- The Edward E. Price Jr. Award for Excellence in Basic Research —Luisella Spiga, PhD, staff scientist in the laboratory of Wenhan Zhu, PhD, assistant professor of Pathology, Microbiology and Immunology, Division of Molecular Pathogenesis.
- The Award for Excellence in Research Contributing to Multi-Investigator Teams — Eric Farber-Eger, principal application developer in the Vanderbilt Institute for Clinical and Translational Research (VICTR).
Each honoree received an award check and crystal trophy.
• LeStourgeon began working as a research analyst at VUMC in 2015, after earning her Master of Public Health degree from Emory University, recruiting more than 500 adults with Type 2 diabetes in a study of medication adherence.
She currently supports the research programs of seven federally funded investigators in the departments of Medicine and Pediatrics whose investigations range from diabetes management to influenza vaccination in lung transplant patients.
“My collaborators call her ‘magical’ in her ability to take sometimes messy study processes and streamline them,” Lindsay Mayberry, PhD, MS, associate professor of Medicine and Biomedical Informatics, wrote in her nomination letter. “She is enhancing and elevating clinical research programs across the enterprise.”
LeStourgeon’s award is named for the late Vivien T. Thomas, the pioneering surgical technician who began his career at Vanderbilt in the 1930s.
• Spiga earned her PhD in Biomedical Science at the University of Sassari, Italy, in 2016, and did postdoctoral work at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas.
A member since 2021 of Zhu’s lab, which focuses on host-microbe interactions in the inflamed intestine, Spiga specializes in using complex murine models and state-of-the-art instrumentation to study inflammatory disorders, including colorectal cancer.
“She was the first to demonstrate that microbes in our gut are crucial to ‘remembering’ infections caused by food-contaminating bacteria such as Salmonella,”Zhu wrote in his nomination letter. “Her expertise and success in science is widely acclaimed, underscored by her publication record in prestigious journals.”
Spiga’s award is named for the late Edward E. Price Jr., an internationally known research assistant in the Department of Biochemistry and Cardiovascular Physiology Core.
• Farber-Eger began working as a systems software specialist in the Computational Genomics Core of the Vanderbilt Center for Human Genetics Research, after earning a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from Vanderbilt in 2012.
He has helped create application program interfaces for data extraction, enabling database research in heart failure and other heart conditions, helped create a heart transplant data curation platform and database infrastructure, the CardioCore initiative, which supports multiple research projects, and has contributed as co-author to more than 60 scientific publications.
“Eric is the most effective staff member with whom I have ever worked,” wrote Quinn Wells, MD, PharmD, MSCI, MSc, associate professor of Medicine in the Division of Cardiovascular Medicine, in nominating Farber-Eger for the award. “The collaborative science of our lab could not happen without him.”