Eric Grogan, MD, MPH
Dr. Eric Grogan was born in Charlottesville, Virginia and raised in Paducah, Kentucky. He attended Lipscomb University in Nashville, TN, was the captain of the tennis team, and graduated summa cum laude in 1995. In 1999, he received his medical degree with honors from Vanderbilt University. While completing a general surgery internship and residency at Vanderbilt, he obtained a master’s degree in public health from Vanderbilt University in 2004, focusing on surgical outcomes research and quality improvement. In 2006, Dr. Grogan continued his cardiothoracic surgery training at the University of Virginia where he also was the minimally invasive thoracic fellow. Dr. Grogan has been on faculty since his return to Vanderbilt in 2008.
Dr. Grogan is certified by the American Board of Thoracic Surgery and his clinical practice includes all areas of general thoracic surgery. He has experience in the treatment of lung and esophageal cancer, mediastinal tumors, and tracheal and bronchoplastic procedures. Dr. Grogan's clinical interests have focused on minimally invasive thoracic surgery for treatment of lung cancer, benign and malignant esophageal diseases. He performs Robotic, VATS and open procedures. Dr. Grogan has been extensively involved in training general surgery and cardiothoracic surgery residents. He has been on the teaching faculty since 2008 and all categorical general surgery residents spend dedicated time on his service as second- and fourth-year residents during their VA rotation (14 per year). The cardiothoracic (CT) fellows spend dedicated time on the Vanderbilt service. He has mentored over 20 CT surgery residents over the past 15 years. He was an Associate Program Director in CT surgery and has been the Program Director for the residency program since 2022. Educating residents in clinical practice and research is his passion and training excellent clinical residents is a component of his daily practice.
Since the untimely passing of his mentor in 2021, Dr. Grogan has been the Co-Director of the MASLAB in the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center. It is a nationally and internationally recognized laboratory that studies biomarkers for the early detection of lung cancer. His research efforts over the past 18 years have focused on improving the accuracy of the evaluation of lung nodules suspicious for lung cancer and improving access to lung cancer detection and care. He has had continuous funding since 2008, is the contact PI for U01, R01 and VA Merit funding and has over 100 publications in peer reviewed journals. Dr. Grogan also co-leads the TREAT Lung Cancer team at VUMC, and his team have developed clinical models to predict who has benign or malignant disease and have studied the impact of imaging (Radiomics and FDG-PET scan) and serum biomarkers (cancer and fungal) to improve the accuracy of the evaluation of lung nodules suspicious for cancer. They have made important discoveries demonstrating that fungal lung disease, such as histoplasmosis, is an important cause of false positive evaluations in lung nodules as well as discoveries in using combination cancer biomarker approaches to more accurately diagnose lung cancer. Present studies focus on the clinical utility of a combined biomarker approach to evaluate indeterminate pulmonary nodules and to diagnose lung cancer and the creation of a veteran’s specific risk model to improve lung cancer screening that incorporates the individual veteran exposures. Through these research teams and others, he has mentored more than 30 individuals in research over the past 15 years. Mentoring the next generation of surgeon scientists is his greatest enjoyment.