Affirmation of Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s high profile in precision medicine came last week when a new working group convened by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) visited Vanderbilt for a two-day public workshop devoted to planning a key component of the federal Precision Medicine Initiative announced earlier this year by President Obama.

On May 28-29 at Vanderbilt, the Precision Medicine Initiative Working Group of the Advisory Committee to the Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) will hold a public workshop devoted to research cohorts and electronic health records.

Josh Denny, M.D., M.S., associate professor of Biomedical Informatics and Medicine, will help guide planning for the precision medicine initiative announced by President Obama in his January State of the Union Address.

The Precision Medicine Initiative is a national effort announced by President Obama during his State of the Union address to provide more effective treatment and prevention strategies for individuals by taking into account their unique genetic, environmental and lifestyle factors.

An international expert on slavery and emancipation during the 18th and 19th centuries was awarded the prestigious Earl Sutherland Prize for Achievement in Research during Vanderbilt University’s Fall Faculty Assembly.

Faculty members Josh Denny, M.D., M.S., associate professor of Biomedical Informatics and Medicine, and Paul Harris, Ph.D., associate professor of Biomedical Informatics and research associate professor of Biomedical Engineering, are among six fellows elected this year to the American College of Medical Informatics.

Vanderbilt University Medical Center researchers and co-authors from four other U.S. institutions from the Electronic Medical Records and Genomics (eMERGE) Network are repurposing genetic data and electronic medical records to perform the first large-scale phenome-wide association study (PheWAS), released today in Nature Biotechnology.