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, is the Director of the Vanderbilt Center for Child Health Policy, an Associate Professor of Pediatrics and Health Policy at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine and an attending neonatologist at Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt. He also currently serves as an Adjunct Physician Policy Research at RAND Corporation, Guest Researcher at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and is a Senior Policy Advisor at the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy.

Dr. Patrick’s National Institute on Drug Abuse-funded research focuses on improving outcomes for opioid-exposed infants and women with opioid use disorder and evaluating state and federal drug control policies. Dr. Patrick is a former 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 women 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 Academic Pediatric Association Fellow Research Award, Tennessee Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics Early Career Physician of the Year, the Nemours Child Health Services Research Award and the Society for Pediatric Research Young Investigator Award. His research has been published in leading scientific journals including the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, Pediatrics and Health Affairs.

Click here to view Dr. Patrick's publications.

Website: https://www.vumc.org/childhealthpolicy/
Email: stephen.patrick@vumc.org
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. 

Click here to view Dr. Osmundson's publications.

Email: sarah.osmundson@vumc.org