Department of Medicine

A childhood role model helped inspire Portia Thomas to pursue a career in medicine and research.
October 1, 2020

Diversity role model inspires career path

Portia Thomas grew up in Doerun, Georgia, a small, rural city named by pioneer hunters as a place with “a perfect doe run,” where the population has hovered around 800 people for the past 30 years. A childhood impression lifted her aspirations beyond her hometown and inspired her to pursue a career as a physician-scientist.

September 24, 2020

VICC leading first global study of MDS/MPN overlap syndrome

Overlap syndromes are distinct blood cancers that present with features of both myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS) and myeloproliferative neoplasms (MPN).

September 17, 2020

Grant from Google to support COVID gene expression study

Vanderbilt University Medical Center and the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill have been awarded $500,000 by Google’s philanthropy, Google.org, to study how COVID-19 alters gene expression in some people in ways that may be linked to their risk of severe illness and death.

September 17, 2020

New predictors of prostate cancer risk

An international group of researchers including Vanderbilt epidemiologists has identified new DNA methylation biomarkers associated with prostate cancer risk.

Sourav Panja, PhD, underwent a complicated procedure at VUMC to treat his relatively rare form of pulmonary hypertension.
September 10, 2020

Technique helped treat patient’s rare pulmonary disorder

Sourav Panja, PhD, a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Pediatrics at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, was working in his lab one evening last year when he began coughing up blood. Even breathing was becoming difficult.

September 10, 2020

Award supports integration of genomic data, electronic health records

Eric Gamazon, PhD, assistant professor of Medicine, has been awarded a $1.5 million grant from the National Human Genome Research Institute, part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), to develop novel computational tools that integrate functional genomic data and electronic health records.