Alumni Profiles

Two Vanderbilt alumnae—Dr. Jill Moses, MD’91, and Annie Moon, MSN’03—are helping lead the fight against COVID-19 in the Navajo Nation, the country’s largest Native American reservation. Read More

GreenLight Medical CEO Austin Dirks bills his company as a smarter way to evaluate new medical technology, using a cloud-based system that pulls together quality and value-based data to streamline collaborative purchasing decisions in hospital and health care systems. Read More

Class of 1999 alumni Chris Murdock and Tom Milic started a recruiting company with a new way of doing business that has grown into a firm with international reach. Read More

A profile of Monique Nelson-Nwachuku, winner of Vanderbilt’s 2020 Alumni Professional Achievement Award, who is chairman and CEO of UniWorld Group, the country’s longest-standing multicultural marketing agency. Read More

Last spring, as thousands of health care employees worked tirelessly to do good in the wake of COVID-19, Houston native Ben Schecter and several Vanderbilt friends, including fellow Class of '18 alumna Allie Golden, decided on a model that would help struggling local restaurants and serve health care workers at the same time. Read More

Kenneth Epps, rear admiral and deputy chief of staff for fleet ordnance and supply in the U.S. Fleet Forces Command, understands the importance of logistics in today’s military. Read More

Michael Ainslie has a knack for seeking out—and solving—difficult problems, as he writes in his new book A Nose for Trouble: Sotheby’s, Lehman Brothers, and My Life of Redefining Adversity. Read More

Watching his aunt struggle with bipolar disorder, Asa Briggs traded in his legal aspirations to pursue a career in mental health care. Read More

Oliver is a co-founder of the Equity Alliance, an organization dedicated to educating and energizing the Black electorate. Read More

Photo by Susan Urmy As director of the Center for STEM Education for Girls at Harpeth Hall School in Nashville, retired Navy Capt. Barbara Bell wants to give girls the confidence and knowledge to excel in technical careers long dominated by men. A 28-year veteran and one of the first… Read More

Duc Pham often speaks about how lucky he has been, despite a difficult childhood during the Vietnam War after which his father, a police captain in South Vietnam, was sentenced without trial by the North Vietnamese to seven and a half years of hard labor in a prison camp. “When… Read More

Like many people her age, Lauren Mandel developed her funny bone to the antics of comedians like Kristen Wiig, Bill Hader and Maya Rudolph on "Saturday Night Live." Read More

It was with a scholarship from the Africa–America Institute that Ann Therese Ndong-Jatta enrolled at Vanderbilt to study educational leadership. Honored with the institute’s Distinguished Alumna Award, she now invests those skills in her native Africa. Read More

Photo by Pamela Lepold Congress passed the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in June 1919, and the amendment became law Aug. 26, 1920, giving American women the right to vote after a decades-long fight. This year, the centennial of women gaining the right to vote, a record number of… Read More

Photo by Elena Cherkashnya Look no further than Tom Mulder to sing the praises of ArtSmart, a nonprofit begun three years ago in which classical musicians provide free individualized music lessons to high school students in underserved communities. “There’s a power in that one-on-one relationship between a teacher and a… Read More

Investigative journalist and New York Times best-selling author Elaine Shannon has spent decades reporting from the globe’s danger zones. Her latest book recounts the efforts to take down notorious criminal Paul LeRoux, whom she describes as “a twisted-genius entrepreneur and cold-blooded killer who brought revolutionary innovation to transnational crime.” Photo… Read More

Dee Margo (photo courtesy City of El Paso) EDITOR’S NOTE: As this issue of Vanderbilt Magazine was going to press, the world was just starting to hear about the tragic mass shooting that took place in El Paso on Aug. 3. Mayor Dee Margo wrote on Twitter in the immediate… Read More

On the wall of heart-rhythm specialist Jeffrey Williams’ medical office is his seventh-grade essay in which he writes that he wants to be a cardiologist. He doesn’t remember writing it, but his younger self accurately predicted the future. As co-director of the Heart Rhythm Center at Lakeland Regional Health in… Read More

Sarah Vaillancourt (Photo by Kevin Richtik/Caroline Photography) Sarah Vaillancourt’s mission—to help women get the care they need—far predated her nursing degree. “I knew I wanted to work in women’s health before I knew exactly what I wanted to do or how I wanted to do it,” says Vaillancourt, who earned… Read More

Dr. Constance Mobley is among only 14 female African American physicians in the U.S. who are abdominal transplant surgeons. She directs the surgical and liver intensive care unit for Houston Methodist Hospital. Photo by Tommy Lavergne As a molecular physiology and biophysics doctoral student at Vanderbilt, Dr. Constance Mobley… Read More