Dr. Zhong’s research has progressed from clinical and translational nephrology to mechanistic studies of progressive kidney disease, CKD-related cardiovascular complications, kidney lymphatic biology, and kidney development. Her work has addressed transplantation, CKD progression, and dialysis-associated cardiovascular risk, and defined mechanisms of HIV-associated nephropathy using transgenic mouse models showing how podocyte-restricted HIV gene expression drives podocyte injury and glomerulosclerosis. She later focused on CKD-associated cardiovascular disease, examining how kidney injury disrupts lipid/lipoprotein biology, macrophage inflammation, vascular injury, and cardiac fibrosis. More recently, she has highlighted kidney lymphatic vessels as active regulators of renal homeostasis and injury responses, helping clear interstitial lipoproteins and immune mediators to shape inflammation, remodeling, and kidney–systemic crosstalk. In parallel, her kidney development studies show how antenatal stress and developmental programming affect nephron endowment, glomerular maturation, and lifelong disease risk. Her current research combines genetic and injury models, molecular/cellular methods, pathology, quantitative imaging, and spatial/pathomics analyses of rodent and human tissue to define how development, lymphatics, lipid handling, and inflammation determine renal repair versus progression.

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Dr. Sullivan is a pediatric cardiologist with advanced training in pediatric pulmonary hypertension. Her research focuses on examining the role of pulmonary vasodilator therapies in the treatment of pulmonary vascular disease in patients with single ventricle congenital heart disease. She also has interest in evaluating the hemodynamics and treatments for pulmonary hypertension associated with congenital heart disease and bronchopulmonary dysplasia. As a member of the multi-disciplinary Vanderbilt Children’s Pediatric Pulmonary Hypertension Program and North American Pediatric Pulmonary Hypertension Network, she is involved in multi-institutional collaborative research on pediatric pulmonary hypertension.

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Dr. Mohammad is a pediatric transplant hepatologist whose focus is improving long-term outcomes in children with chronic liver disease. He studies quality of life and interventions to improve health outcomes in pediatric transplant recipients from infancy to young adulthood. He has led efforts to develop national consortia to help study rare liver diseases.

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Dr. Rachel Robison is a pediatric allergist-immunologist with over 15 years of experience conducting clinical research studies of asthma and food allergy. She is the site co-principal investigator of the Vanderbilt Clinical Research Center for the Consortium for Food Allergy Research (CoFAR) funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a collaborative research program bringing together centers and focused on advancing efforts in prevention, management strategies, and improving knowledge on the origins of food allergies. Her research interests include the study of novel therapeutics for treatment of food allergy, immunotherapy and understanding how these therapies can be successfully integrated into real-world patient care. She participates as an investigator in sponsored clinical trials for novel therapeutics in both food allergy and asthma. It is her goal as a clinical trialist to remain on the cutting edge of clinical research leading to changes in the landscape of atopy treatment by both designing trials and by implementing multicenter and consortium trials for the prevention and treatment of asthma and food allergy.

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