Julia Bohannon, PhD (photo by Donn Jones)
Julia Bohannon, PhD, associate professor of Anesthesiology and Pathology, Microbiology and Immunology, is the new president-elect of the Shock Society. She will assume the position in July.
The society was founded in 1977 to help integrate basic and clinical sciences in the study of the pathophysiology and treatment of trauma and shock and to promote awareness of their importance for health. The society promotes research in molecular, cellular and systemic pathobiological aspects of shock and trauma.
Bohannon has been a member of the Shock Society for more than a decade and has served as chair of its publications committee since 2022. She is also a member of the editorial board of Shock, the society’s journal.
Her research focuses on how the immune system responds to severe burn injury — a question that carries personal meaning. Bohannon was herself badly burned as a child, an experience that has shaped her commitment to developing better therapies for burn patients. Her laboratory investigates the mechanisms of immune dysfunction that leave burn survivors vulnerable to life-threatening infections, and whether those defenses can be restored or reinforced through trained immunity — a form of immune memory in which innate immune cells are reprogrammed to mount stronger responses to future threats.
That work is supported by a five-year, $2.2 million Outstanding Investigator Award from the National Institutes of Health (grant R35GM141927). Bohannon joined Vanderbilt Health in 2012 as a postdoctoral fellow and joined the faculty in 2015.
She earned her PhD in microbiology and immunology from the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston and completed postdoctoral training in anesthesiology research at Vanderbilt Health.
