When Darlena Clark of Hendersonville, Tennessee, saw Jon Strong for the first time at Nashville International Airport she, “just grabbed him and hugged him and just held on.”

The charter that was written in 1989 upon the creation of the Vanderbilt Transplant Center (VTC) continues to hold true to its mission — to propel and direct organ transplantation, research, medicine, technology, education and the public education of transplantation into the future as the recognized leader and national authority of multi-organ transplantation.

Douglas Hanto, M.D., Ph.D., has his sights on Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt. No stranger to building nationally recognized liver transplant programs — he has three under his belt — the new associate director of the Vanderbilt Transplant Center aims to work with the departments of Pediatrics and Surgery to develop a comprehensive pediatric liver center at Children’s Hospital.

What started as a way to gather nurse practitioners in the field of transplantation at Vanderbilt to talk about the best practices in managing patients has grown into a one-of-a-kind national conference.

Up to 60 percent of patients who receive a stem cell transplant using cells from another donor will develop post-transplant diabetes mellitus, which can increase the rate of complications and death after the procedure.

More than three decades ago, J. Harold Helderman, M.D., medical director of the Vanderbilt Transplant Center, joined a handful of colleagues from across the country to create a society for transplant physicians.

A Vanderbilt University Medical Center postdoctoral research fellow in the area of transplant outcomes research has added health literacy as a metric to an existing battery of surveys that assess patient-reported outcomes in Vanderbilt transplant patients.