Vanderbilt MPRINT Leadership Team & Mentors

Prince Kannankeril, MD, MSCI

Prince Kannankeril, MD, MSCI

Dr. Kannankeril is a clinical pediatric cardiologist/electrophysiologist with formal training in clinical/translational research. His research program investigates genetic variants and their contribution to cardiovascular disease and clinical outcomes (Personalized Medicine). He is Professor of Pediatrics (Cardiology), with faculty appointments in both the Vanderbilt Genetics Institute (VGI) and the Vanderbilt Center for Arrhythmia Research and Therapeutics (VanCART) and serves as Co-Director of the Center for Pediatric Precision Medicine at Vanderbilt.

Click here to view Dr. Kannankeril's publications.

Email: prince.kannankeril@vumc.org


 

Wei-Qi Wei, MD, PhD, FAMIA

Wei-Qi Wei, MD, PhD, FAMIA

Wei-Qi Wei, MD, PhD, FAMIA is an Assistant Professor (tenure track) in Biomedical Informatics in the School of Medicine at Vanderbilt University.  His research focuses on developing new informatics tools/resources to optimize phenotyping performance or enable deep phenotyping through terminology/ontology, NLP, and machine learning. His major work also includes enabling precision medicine through making pharmacogenomics discoveries that may favorably affect a patient’s treatment outcome using big EHR data. His projects are primarily supported by American heart association (AHA) and NIH including several R01s and U01/P50/U2C grants. Dr. Wei participated an important role in several significant collaboration research networks. He currently serves as the co-chair of phenotyping working group of the Electronic Medical Records and Genomics (eMERGE) Network. He is also a member of the Coordinating Center of All of Us.

Click here to view Dr. Wei's publications.

Website: https://www.vumc.org/wei-lab
Email: wei-qi.wei@vumc.org
Twitter: @weiweiq


 

Stephen Patrick, MD, MPH, MS

Stephen W. Patrick, MD, MPH, MS

Stephen W. Patrick, MD, MPH, MS, FAAP is Professor and Chair of the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Rollins School of Public Health, Co-Director of the Center for Health Services Research, and a practicing neonatologist at Emory University. He is also an Adjunct Physician Policy Researcher at RAND Corporation. Dr. Patrick joined Rollins from Vanderbilt University Medical Center where he was Professor of Pediatrics and Health Policy, the William R. Long Director of Child Health Policy at the Vanderbilt Center for Child Health Policy, and Executive Director of Firefly. Dr. Patrick is a graduate of the University of Florida, Florida State University College of Medicine, and Harvard School of Public Health. Dr. Patrick completed his training in pediatrics, neonatology and health services research as a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholar at the University of Michigan.

Dr. Patrick’s National Institutes of Health-funded research focuses on improving outcomes for pregnant people with opioid use disorder and their infants. He previously served as Senior Policy Advisor to the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy where he led an interagency policy process that resulted in the Administration’s action plan to improve outcomes for pregnant people with substance use disorder and their infants. He also previously served as a Guest Researcher at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as a member of the American Academy of Pediatrics Committee on Substance Use and Prevention, and has been a voting member on several US Food and Drug Administration Advisory Boards focused on opioid use in children. He has testified about the impact of the opioid crisis on pregnant people and infants before committees in both the US House of Representatives and the US Senate. Dr. Patrick’s awards include the American Medical Association Foundation Excellence in Medicine Leadership Award, the Nemours Child Health Services Research Award, the Society for Pediatric Research Young Investigator Award and the Gale and Ira Drukier Prize in Children’s Health Research. He has published more than 130 peer review articles including in leading scientific journals including the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, Pediatrics and Health Affairs.

Click here to view Dr. Patrick's publications.

Email: stephen.patrick@emory.edu
Twitter: @stephenwpatrick


 

Digna Velez Edwards, PhD, MS

Digna Velez Edwards, PhD, MS

Dr. Edwards' research is focused on understanding and identifying genetic risk factors for complex diseases with a specific focus on diseases that disproportionately impact minorities and genetic factors related to women’s health and reproductive outcomes. To conduct these studies, she utilizes large clinical databases that link electronic health record (EHR) information to DNA and the Right from the Start cohort, a community-based prospective pregnancy cohort. Her current research projects include genetic studies of preterm birth, miscarriage, uterine fibroids, pelvic organ prolapse, and keloids. These studies include genome-wide association analyses, next-generation sequencing, evaluation of biomarkers, and phenome-wide association studies.

Click here to view Dr. Edwards' publications.

Website: https://www.vumc.org/vee-labs/
Email: digna.r.velez.edwards@vumc.org


 

Julia Phillippi, PhD, CNM

Julia Phillippi, PhD, CNM

Julia C. Phillippi, PhD, CNM, FACNM is a certified nurse midwife, Assistant Professor at the Vanderbilt University School of Nursing, and Director of the Nurse-Midwifery specialty program. The improvement of the health of women and infants is the ‘North Star’ of her work. As a practicing clinician, she strives to make her research relevant to the everyday realities of women and providers in diverse settings within the United States. She has experience in prospective and retrospective approaches to midwifery health services research and uses qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods to explore topics relevant to maternal-child health.  She has a particular interest in how the format and location of care affect women’s ability and desire to access services as well as their perinatal outcomes. She has a passion for interprofessional care and frequently serves as a midwifery liaison on national committees that craft practice statements relevant to a variety of perinatal health care providers.

Click here to view Dr. Phillippi's publications.

Email: julia.c.phillippi@vanderbilt.edu


 

Sarah Osmundson, MD, MS

Sarah Osmundson, MD, MS

Sarah Osmundson is an Associate Professor of Obstetrics & Gynecology at Vanderbilt University. Originally from Chicago, she attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign majoring in anthropology and biology. After graduating, she taught high school biology at Juarez High School in Chicago with Teach for America. She attended medical school at the University of Illinois at Chicago and completed her residency in OB/Gyn at Northwestern. She did her fellowship in Maternal-Fetal Medicine at Stanford and as well as a Master’s in Epidemiology and Clinical Research.

Dr. Osmundson's research examines opioid prescribing and use after childbirth, electronic health record-embedded tools to support clinical decision making, prediction modeling, pharmacoepidemiology, and therapeutic inertia associated with diabetes management during pregnancy. Her research is supported by the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Dr. Osmundson serves on the publications committee for the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine, collaborating with MFMs across the United States on guidelines for clinical practice. In August 2019, she was awarded a five-year Career Development Award through the National Institutes of Health. 

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Email: sarah.osmundson@vumc.org


 

Andrew Wiese, PhD, MPH

Andrew Wiese, PhD, MPH

Andrew Wiese, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Pharmacoepidemiology, Department of Health Policy at Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC). His research focuses on leveraging observational studies to provide real-world evidence of the safety and efficacy of commonly used medications and vaccines, including among pregnant patients.

His current work is focused on using the TN Medicaid Mother-Child Linked Cohort (MCLC) data platform to characterize the safety of medication use for patients and infants during pregnancy and in the postpartum period, as well as using the Full TN Medicaid Cohort to examine the impact of pharmaceutical policies on medication use and medication-related outcomes. He is also interested in the development and implementation of novel research methods to characterize drug dose exposures using administrative data.

Dr. Wiese has published widely using administrative data to examine the risks of opioid analgesic use, including the risk of serious-opioid related harms among women using prescribed opioids in the postpartum period and the association between prescribed opioids and the risk of serious infections.

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Email: andrew.d.wiese.1@vumc.org