Department of Surgery

Artel Thorpe Sr. of Jackson, Tennessee, recently became the first person in the United States to undergo a new, less invasive surgical technique for implanting a left ventricular assist device (LVAD) heart pump since it was granted Federal Drug Administration (FDA) approval on July 11.

Carmen Solórzano, MD, professor of Surgery and chief of the Division of Surgical Oncology and Endocrine Surgery, has been named the interim chair of Vanderbilt’s Department of Surgery.

With the opening of a pre-transplant kidney evaluation clinic in Jackson, Tennessee, the Vanderbilt Transplant Center is joining a range of other clinical programs participating in telemedicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.

After successfully leading Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s Section of Surgical Sciences and serving as the Medical Center’s Surgeon-in-Chief since 2001, R. Daniel Beauchamp, MD, the John Clinton Foshee Distinguished Professor of Surgery, is stepping down. Beauchamp will be succeeded in this role by Seth Karp, MD, H. William Scott Jr. Professor and chair of the Department of Surgery and director of the Vanderbilt Transplant Center.

There have long been more questions than answers when it comes to abdominal hernia repair surgeries, but now, thanks to a database full of information supplied by both surgeons and patients, those answers are coming to light and driving nationwide improvements.

Vanderbilt researchers are comparing two types of weight-loss options to determine which is the most effective in helping obese patients reach a more ideal weight before undergoing kidney transplant surgery.

Microtubules are the “railroad tracks” essential for moving intracellular “freight” around in the cell. They’re also part of the spindle that pulls the two centrosomes apart during cell division.