Two early-career faculty members in the Division of Allergy, Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center have been awarded prestigious fellowships by the Francis Family Foundation of Kansas City, Missouri.
They are Scott McCall, MD, PhD, instructor in Medicine, and Kevin Seitz, MD, MSc, assistant professor of Medicine.
“It is an honor for our division to have two Parker B. Francis Fellows this year,” said Division Director Anna Hemnes, MD, professor of Medicine. “This Fellowship has supported several members of our division and catalyzed their early career development.
“Past awardees are leaders in their fields and are driving new knowledge in diverse areas, such as mechanisms of acute lung injury and acute respiratory distress syndrome, as well as pulmonary fibrosis,” said Hemnes, who holds the Elsa S. Hanigan Chair in Pulmonary Medicine.
Established in 1976, the Parker B. Francis (PBF) Fellowship Program provides $225,000 over three years to MD and PhD scientists to support their careers in clinical, laboratory or translational science in the fields of pulmonary medicine, critical care and sleep medicine.
McCall earned his MD and PhD from Vanderbilt and completed residency and fellowship training at VUMC. He is investigating a potential new treatment for idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, a progressive, incurable lung disease that is on the rise in the United States.
His group will study mechanisms through which abnormal activation of the hypoxia-inducible factor (HIF) pathway interferes with stem-cell repair of injured lung tissue, and how HIF2 -inhibition may provide a novel therapy to promote functional lung repair.
In 2024, McCall was selected as a Vanderbilt Faculty Research Scholar. The program helps junior faculty and postdoctoral fellows launch careers in biomedical research.
Seitz earned his MD and MSc from Emory University and completed his fellowship in pulmonary and critical care medicine at VUMC.
In 2024, he received an Emerging Generation Award from the American Society for Clinical Investigation. The award recognized his design of pragmatic, randomized clinical trials aimed at improving patient care for critically ill adults.
Supported by the PBF Fellowship, Seitz will design and lead a multicenter, randomized, pragmatic clinical trial involving more than 4,500 critically ill patients on mechanical ventilation in the intensive care unit. The goal of the study is to determine whether the choice of breathing machine mode settings may improve patient outcomes.
Previous PBF fellows currently at VUMC include faculty members Jason Gokey, PhD, Jonathan Kropski, MD, Christian Rosas-Salazar, MD, MPH, Ciara Shaver, MD, PhD, Jennifer Sucre, MD, and, last year, Nick Negretti, PhD, senior postdoctoral fellow in the Sucre laboratory.
Kropski, associate professor of Medicine, and Rosas-Salazar, assistant professor of Pediatrics, subsequently won the Parker B. Francis Jo Rae Wright Award for Scientific Excellence, given to former PBF fellows “whose research shows exceptional creativity and promise, and who (have) demonstrated outstanding mentoring and professional leadership qualities.”
