Matt Batcheldor

The American Association of Critical Care Nurses (AACN) has awarded the Bronze Level Beacon Award to the Pediatric Cardiac Intensive Care Unit (PCICU) at Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt. The award is given to nursing units that distinguish themselves by excellence and a commitment to improve patient care.

Matthew Bacchetta, MD, MBA, MA, has joined the Department of Thoracic Surgery as an associate professor and the surgical director of a new respiratory institute at Vanderbilt University Medical Center that will be launched soon.

Anne Marie Tharpe, PhD, might not have become a worldwide authority on pediatric hearing loss if she hadn’t been looking for something to do during study hall in her high school years in Memphis. One day, she and a friend volunteered to work in a classroom with deaf children.

Reyna Gordon, PhD, assistant professor of Otolaryngology and director of the Music Cognition Lab in the Department of Otolaryngology at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, has received a National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director’s New Innovator Award of $2.3 million in total costs for her project, “Biomarkers of Rhythmic Communication: Integrating Foundational and Translational Approaches.”

Vanderbilt University Medical Center Nursing has launched the Jerita Payne Transplant Nurse Practitioner Fellowship, one of the first of its kind in the country.

Surgeons face a delicate proposition when treating acoustic neuromas, benign tumors on the nerve that affect hearing and balance. Removing small tumors through surgery and radiation can cause complications such as the loss of hearing, when the tumors may not grow and impact quality of life for years. But not removing them can allow them to grow and be more difficult to remove and pose even greater risks.