Thirteen outstanding faculty members from across Vanderbilt University have been selected for the 2024 cohort of Chancellor Faculty Fellows. This group is composed of highly accomplished, recently tenured faculty from a wide variety of disciplines and areas of expertise.
There are five fellows from Vanderbilt University School of Medicine (VUSM). Each fellow holds the title for two years, receives $40,000 per year to support their work, and meets with their cohort to exchange ideas on teaching and research, build a broader intellectual community that advances collaborative scholarship and engage in academic leadership development to increase their leadership capacity.
VUSM faculty fellows for 2024:
Carolyn Audet, PhD, is an associate professor of Health Policy and an investigator in the Vanderbilt Institute for Global Health. She is also an Honorary Associate Professor at MRC/Wits Rural Public Health and Health Transitions Research Unit (Agincourt), in the School of Public Health, Faculty of Health Sciences, at University of the Witwatersrand, in Johannesburg, South Africa. Her three main lines of research include: 1) male partner engagement in HIV care and treatment of their pregnant wives/partners to increase uptake of testing and treatment while promoting empathy and support; 2) collaboration with traditional healers and traditional birth attendants to increase testing, linkage and treatment adherence among people living with HIV; and 3) changing health care policy to ensure traditional healers have access to the personal prevention equipment they need. Audet is the PI on several grants from NIMH, NIAID and the CDC.
Erin Calipari, PhD, is an associate professor of Pharmacology in the School of Medicine – Basic Sciences. Calipari has established an international reputation in neuropharmacology and is well known for her work to identify novel aspects of dopaminergic signaling in regulation of behavior and neuronal circuits.
Annet Kirabo, DVM, MSc, PhD, is an associate professor of Medicine, Clinical Pharmacology and an associate professor of Molecular Physiology and Biophysics in the School of Medicine – Basic Sciences. Her research program aims to define the molecular mechanisms underlying activation of the immune system in response to hypertensive stimuli including excess dietary salt, sympathetic nerve outflow and oxidative stress.
Jeffrey Spraggins, PhD, is an associate professor of Cell and Developmental Biology in the School of Medicine – Basic Sciences. Spraggins is a prominent researcher specializing in mass spectrometry and imaging mass spectrometry within the burgeoning field of “multi-omics.”
Wei-Qi Wei, MD, PhD, FAMIA, is an associate professor of Biomedical Informatics. His research focuses on developing new informatics tools/resources to optimize phenotyping performance or enable deep phenotyping through terminology/ontology, natural language processing and machine learning.
The Chancellor Faculty Fellows program was launched in September 2014 under the Trans-Institutional Programs initiative to support outstanding faculty who have recently received tenure. This year, Chancellor Faculty Fellow candidates were nominated by their deans or deans’ designees.
The Chancellor Faculty Fellows Review Committee, comprising past fellows with collaborative oversight by Tracey George, vice provost for faculty affairs and professional education, and Jennifer Pietenpol, PhD, chief scientific and strategy officer and executive vice president for Research for VUMC, reviewed all the nominations and made recommendations to Cybele Raver, PhD. The chancellor made the final selections.
