The American Liver Foundation (ALF) honored two Vanderbilt Transplant Center physicians during its annual Flavors of Nashville Gala held recently at the Gaylord Springs Club at Opryland Hotel.

Seth Karp, M.D., professor of Surgery and Ingram Professor of Surgical Sciences, has been named the new chair of Vanderbilt’s Department of Surgery.

C. Wright Pinson, MBA, M.D., deputy vice chancellor for Health Affairs and CEO of the Vanderbilt Health System, is the recipient of the Americas Hepato-Pancreato-Biliary Association (AHPBA) 2015 Distinguished Service Award.

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.

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.