Dr. Orsagh-Yentis has a particular interest in motility disorders, having completed an advanced year of fellowship in that field. She is also passionate about advocacy and patient safety and ways to make products safer for children. She has been interviewed by The New York Times, NBC, ABC, and Nature about her work on foreign body ingestions.

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RNA viruses are ubiquitous intracellular parasites that cause many important diseases. To successfully replicate in the different tissues and hosts they encounter, viruses must be able to efficiently bind, enter, and replicate in target cells and to adapt rapidly to environmental pressures. Large population size, fast replication rate, and short generation time permit RNA virus populations to evolve much more rapidly than DNA-based organisms.     Research in the Ogden Lab is focused on understanding mechanisms by which segmented, double stranded RNA viruses, including rotavirus and reovirus, acquire genetic diversity and the impacts of this diversity on virus and host populations. Rotavirus is an important cause of diarrheal disease that results in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of infants and young children each year. Licensed vaccines have significantly reduced the burden of rotavirus disease in several countries, but they may be exerting pressures leading to shifts in the antigenic makeup of predominantly circulating strains. The Ogden Lab is exploring vaccine-elicited antibody recognition of specific outer-capsid antigens and identifying rotavirus species and cell-type tropism determinants. Reovirus is an oncolytic virus that infects many mammalian species, including humans, but causes disease only in newborn animals. The Ogden Lab uses reovirus to answer fundamental questions about segmented, double-stranded RNA virus structure, virus-cell interactions, and viral diversity. Themes currently being explored include packaging signals, gene segment reassortment during coinfection, virus transmission in extracellular vesicles, and structural dynamics of the attachment protein during cell entry.  

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My research focuses on the diagnostic process for PCD, specifically on the role of nasal nitric oxide (nNO) testing in making a diagnosis of PCD.

Dr. Nicholson’s research interests focus on functional outcome and sequelae of interventional pediatric cardiology procedures through multi center collaboration. In addition, he's worked alongside Drs. Dana Janssen and Thomas Doyle to found Influent Medical, LLC, a biomedical startup with a mission of developing devices for congenital heart disease.

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Dr. Nicholson has a broad background in clinical and epidemiologic pediatric research, including advanced training in biostatistics and protocol development and experience conducting prospective studies requiring patient enrollment. These skills were obtained through her fellowship in Pediatric Gastroenterology, Hepatology, and Nutrition and acquiring a Master's of Public Health in Epidemiology at Vanderbilt University. As an Associate Professor of Pediatrics in Pediatric Gastroenterology, Hepatology, and Nutrition, she has established the Pediatric C. difficile Clinic, which cares for children with refractory and recurrent C. difficile disease. She has also established the Pediatric Fecal Microbiota Transplantation (FMT) program at Monroe Carell Jr. Children's Hospital at Vanderbilt and established herself as an expert in the treatment of C. difficile infections nationally as the co-PI on a multi-center consortium evaluating FMT in pediatric patients with recurrent C. difficile. She received the North American Society for Pediatric Gastroenterology, Hepatology, and Nutrition (NASGPHAN) Young Faculty Clinical Investigator award for this work and has been made the NASGPHAN FMT Special Interest Group co-chair. She has had continuous NIH funding since 2012, including NIAID K23 and U19 awards, and over 40 peer-reviewed publications.

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