Kevin W. Sexton, MD, is a surgeon-scientist with board certifications in Surgery and Clinical Informatics, he has used this expertise to create software that worked across multiple electronic medical records to predict patient complications in hospital and outpatient settings (Midas+ Live™) and has created medical devices designed to use venous waveforms to monitor patients.  The software was acquired by Affiliated Computer Services (a Xerox company) and the device is licensed to Baxter International, both Fortune 500 companies.

Kevin is currently a Professor of Surgery and Biomedical Informatics at Vanderbilt University where he serves as the Vice Chair of Innovation for the Section of Surgical Sciences. Previously, he served as Associate Chief Clinical Informatics Officer for Innovation, Research, and Entrepreneurship at UAMS, the Associate Director of the UAMS Institute for Digital Health & Innovation, and President of BioVentures, LLC, the UAMS technology transfer office.

Kevin has authored over 100 peer reviewed publications and has a track record of extramural funding from the National Institute of Health, Health Resources and Services Administration, and Department of Defense, among others. He is currently funded by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences and the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences of the National Institutes of Health under award numbers R01 GM 111324, UL1 TR003107, KL2 TR003108, and TL1 TR003109.

Kevin has been involved with health tech startups for the last 15 years and currently serves as advisor to several digital health companies. Kevin is also a professional coach who specializes working with healthcare executives and healthcare software companies.

Scholar:  ‪Kevin W. Sexton, MD - ‪Google Scholar

Pubmed: My Bibliography - NCBI

Linkedin: Kevin W. Sexton | LinkedIn

ORCID: Kevin W. Sexton (0000-0002-1460-9867) - ORCID

KF Mittendorf, PhD, is interdisciplinary scientist whose current research focuses on translational genomics and cancer care delivery, especially as it impacts different populations who often have less access to research and health care resources or face other societal challenges. Dr. Mittendorf has extensive experience in genomic evidence synthesis, data modeling, web application development, community-driven research design, and genomic applications in care delivery. Dr. Mittendorf's PhD in biochemistry, with a focus on molecular biophysics, gives me a unique foundation to understand the molecular mechanisms at play in translational studies. Dr. Mittendorf have cross-disciplinary training that covers epidemiology, qualitative research, bioethics, and informatics. 

Andrew Smith, MD, MSCI, MMHC, is a pediatric cardiac intensivist whose academic efforts focus upon understanding and improving outcomes for children following congenital heart surgery. Specifically, his interests include the application of supervised machine learning approaches to better appreciate modifiable risk factors associated with postoperative clinical outcomes, understanding and mitigating the cognitive burden associated with interruptive alerts in an intensive care unit environment, and leveraging clinical registry experience to explore linkages between large administrative and clinical datasets to better understand resource demands associated with high-quality care. For over 15 years, he has also pursued his interest in personalized medicine by exploring the role of genetic variants and their contribution to postoperative outcomes commonly encountered in the cardiac intensive care unit.

M.D.
University of Maryland School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD (2001)
M.S.C.I.
Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, Nashville, TN (2007)
M.M.H.C.
Vanderbilt University Owen Graduate School of Management, Nashville, TN (2012)
Residency
Pediatrics - Vanderbilt University Medical Center/Monroe Carell Jr. Children's Hospital at Vanderbilt, Nashville, TN (2004)
Fellowships
Pediatric Cardiology - Vanderbilt University Medical Center/Monroe Carell Jr. Children's Hospital at Vanderbilt, Nashville, TN (2007)
Pediatric Critical Care Medicine - Vanderbilt University Medical Center/Monroe Carell Jr. Children's Hospital at Vanderbilt, Nashville, TN (2009)
Senior Clinical Fellowship, Cardiac Critical Care Medicine - Children's Hospital Boston, Boston, MA (2009)

Carlos Mery, MD, MPH, joined VUMC in October 2024 as the new chief of Pediatric Cardiac Surgery, succeeding David Bichell, MD. He was previously associate chief of Pediatric and Congenital Cardiothoracic Surgery at the Texas Center for Pediatric and Congenital Heart Disease, a collaboration between UT Health Austin and Dell Children’s Medical Center. 

Mery specializes in the management of children and adults with congenital heart disease, including simple and complex congenital heart defects. His passion is to help every patient with congenital heart disease have access to high-quality, comprehensive and personalized care.

In Texas, Mery, who has an extensive background in congenital heart surgery and research, has emphasized the importance of personalized medicine and patient-centric care by helping create an integrated heart center, robust data infrastructure and psychosocial support for patients and families. Among his many roles there, he has served as a professor in the departments of Surgery and Perioperative Care and Pediatrics, and the director of health transformation and design in congenital heart disease.

Mery received his medical degree from Tecnológico de Monterrey, Mexico, and subsequently completed a postdoctoral research fellowship at Instituto Nacional de la Nutrición “Salvador Zubirán” in Mexico, and a research fellowship in thoracic surgery and clinical junior fellowship in cardiac surgery at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. He completed his general surgery residency at Brigham and Women’s Hospital/Harvard Medical School, cardiothoracic fellowship at University of Virginia and congenital heart surgery fellowship at Texas Children’s Hospital/Baylor College of Medicine. Mery holds a master’s degree in public health from Harvard School of Public Health as well as a fellowship in surgical innovation from Stanford University. 

QiPing Feng, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Medicine in the Division of Clinical Pharmacology, Department of Medicine, at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.

Dr. Feng received her bachelor’s degree from Wuhan University and Ph.D. degree from Peking Union Medical College & Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences (PUMC & CAMS) in China. She joined Vanderbilt University Medical Center as a research fellow, and then was promoted to Research Instructor and Research Assistant Professor. In 2017, her appointment was transferred to the tenure track as an Assistant Professor of Medicine.

Dr. Feng’s research focuses on the genetic analysis of lipid-lowering drugs (statins, PCSK9 inhibitors, etc.) in the context of drug outcome, pleiotropic effects, and related clinical phenotypes. Her contribution to the genetic analysis of clinical phenotypes includes defining the genetics of statin response determined from BioVU (Clinical Pharmacology Therapeutics 2013, Pharmacogenomics J 2016); identifying LPA as a predictor for residual CVD risk while on statins (Circulation 2018); elucidating the relationship between low LDL-C levels and clinical phenotypes—such as type 2 diabetes and sepsis (PLoS Med 2018, JAMA network OPEN 2019); and understanding the pleiotropy effects of statin drugs using Mendelian randomization (MR) and Phenome-wide association (PheWAS) approach (JAMA network OPEN 2021). Dr. Feng has been funded by NIH since 2016. She has authored or co-authored more than 60 publications.

Dr. Shirts's research has included on statistical and bioinformatic methods to improve genetics sequencing analysis. To an increasing degree my research focuses on translational work related to communication of genetic test results between laboratories, providers, patients and their families. One recent successful project on new strategies to help hereditary cancer patients communicate about their genetic risk with relatives led to the development of a non-profit organization, ConnectMyVariant. ConnectMyVariant helps patients across the world find and connect with others who have the same pathogenic variants so that they can share stories, find common ancestors, and encourage each other to reach out to relatives.

Dr. Shirts is Service Medical Director of the Molecular Genetics Laboratories, including Cytogenetics, Molecular Diagnostics and Clinical Genomics. 

PubMed

PhD, Computer Science, University of Minnesota

Research interests include: bioinformatics, causal inference, cancer genomics, computational biology, data science, high-dimensional statistics, machine learning

More information: amirasiaee.com

Wendy K. Tam is Professor and Stevenson Chair of Computer Science, Political Science, Law, and Biomedical Informatics at Vanderbilt University, an affiliate at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and Professor Emerita at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Professional Researcher in the School of Medicine at the University of California at San Francisco. She has been a Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Society for Political Methodology, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (Stanford), and a Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution (Stanford). 

As an attending in the Cardiac Intensive Care Unit, my overarching career goal is to improve early and late outcomes for children with cardiac disease with a primary focus on sedation and pain management practices during the patient’s intensive care unit stay. Through novel data discovery, pattern recognition and visualizations of large amount of data over time, I have developed recommended age-based analgesia/sedation pathways and metrics for patients in the CICU. With current, accurate and timely clinical reports and dashboarding, I continue to lead scientific processes and analytics leveraging data for quality improvement and excellent care at the bedside for the most fragile patients in the pediatric cardiac intensive care unit.

My research on medication choices and the effect on post-operative mechanical ventilation revealed that meticulous post-operatively pain and sedation management allows for less opioid exposure and early liberation from ventilator support after cardiac surgery, even for the youngest patients. My more recent publications include a novel approach to analyze high fidelity hemodynamic data including millions of beat-to-beat systolic blood pressure measurements surrounding recorded medication administration in our PCICU. The development of algorithms around therapies and interventions in the ICU using expert systems allows the analysis of time-series data. This provides insight to clinicians who can be prepared to intervene and act accordingly, improving outcomes for these critically ill children. This work in big data sets has led to my pursuit of board certification in Clinical Informatics and membership with the Alliance of AI in Medicine and Pediatric Centers of Artificial Intelligence in Medicine (PCAIM).

M.D.
Jefferson Medical College, 1996
Residency
Pediatrics - Children's Hospital of Philadelphia
Fellowships
Pediatric Critical Care - Children's Hospital of Philadelphia
Pediatric Cardiac Critical Care - Children's Hospital of Philadelphia
Board Certification
Clinical Informatics, 2023

Chase J. Webber, DO, is Associate Professor of Clinical Medicine in the Division of General Internal Medicine and Public Health within the Department of Medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. As an academic hospitalist and VUSM Master Clinical Teacher, Dr. Webber has a special interest in the education of residents and medical students. He serves as co-director of the "How Doctors Think" Clinical Reasoning course for VUSM medical students. He received the Outstanding Preceptor Inpatient Award in 2020 and the Hugh J. Morgan Teaching Award for Best Faculty Teacher (VA) from the Internal Medicine Housestaff in 2021. His research interests include clinical reasoning, microlearning, and narrative medicine, and he is a member of the Gold Humanism Honors Society. Dr. Webber grew up in Middle Tennessee and is a graduate of Brentwood High School. He completed his BA in English and German literature at Tufts University in Boston, where he was a Tisch College Public Service and Citizenship Scholar. He attended medical school at Kirksville College of Osteopathic Medicine, and then in 2014 returned to New England for his residency in internal medicine at the University of Massachusetts. He joined the Vanderbilt faculty as Assistant Professor of Clinical Medicine in 2017.

PubMed