Public Health

Sean Seymore, Centennial Professor of Law at Vanderbilt Law School, argues that federal courts have “abandoned their gatekeeping function” for protecting public health in patent cases. Read More

Widespread trust in vaccines often leads to higher vaccination rates, but vaccine shortages can deter even those with confidence in vaccines. Furthermore, while vaccine mandates can create an appearance of universal vaccination, people may remain hesitant, resulting in lower compliance than anticipated. Read More

Vanderbilt biologists Nicole Creanza and Kerri-Ann Anderson have developed a new mathematical model, rooted in cultural evolution, that represents vaccine hesitancy as a belief that can influence, but not perfectly predict, whether parents will decide to vaccinate their children. Read More

Layan Ibrahim, Master of Public Health Class of 2023, was named to the 2023–24 class of Luce Scholars. The Luce Scholars Program is a nationally competitive fellowship program launched by the Henry Luce Foundation to enhance the understanding of Asia among potential leaders in American society. Read More

Research from Associate Professor of Medical and Linguistic Anthropology T.S. Harvey demonstrates how a disease’s name can have a significant impact on the public’s perception, attitude and behavior toward the disease. Harvey argues that disease names should be selected with careful consideration of their potential impacts on public health from the framing of risk perceptions through the circulation of harmful misinformation. Read More

Vanderbilt health sciences graduate and professional students are invited to join together for food and refreshments before the Vanderbilt baseball game against the University of Georgia on Friday, March 31 at 4 p.m. Read More

There are many things Vanderbilt community members can do to protect themselves, as well as their friends, colleagues and fellow community members, from various illnesses. Among them is getting the new bivalent COVID vaccine booster, which targets the omicron subvariants that currently make up 99 percent of new cases in the U.S. Read More

Mosquito-borne diseases like malaria represent an ongoing global health crisis of (literally) biblical proportions. LJ Zwiebel has identified the biological factors that help female mosquitos mate, suck blood and sense environmental threats. Est. reading time: 1.5 mins. Read More

The Vanderbilt Project on Unity and American Democracy and Vanderbilt University Medical Center will host “Vaccine Hesitancy: The Politics of Public Health in Tennessee,” a virtual event, on Wednesday, Aug. 18, at noon CT. Read More

A Vanderbilt co-authored study of Brazilian responses to COVID-19 offers insight on the merits of social medicine while challenging widely held assumptions about traditional public health models. Read More

Men’s health across Tennessee is trending toward improvement, according to the 2020 Tennessee Men’s Health Report Card, but racial and geographic disparities persist. The report card is compiled by Vanderbilt’s Center for Research on Men’s Health in cooperation with Vanderbilt University Medical Center, the Tennessee Department of Health, Meharry Medical College and the Tennessee Men’s Health Network. Read More

Consuelo Hopkins Wilkins, professor of medicine in the School of Medicine and vice president for health equity at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, has received one of the highest honors in health and medicine. Read More

Thinking about a career in public health? Explore multiple public health schools and programs during a virtual event on Wednesday, July 8. Read More

Chief diversity officers from across the Southeastern Conference will offer a webinar on Wednesday, June 24, exploring the intersection of race and the COVID-19 health crisis. The Vanderbilt-hosted webinar is free and open to the public. Read More

The new factor, an enzyme involved in host-pathogen interactions, may be a viable target for treating staph infections. Read More

There's good and bad news in the new Tennessee Men's Health Report Card. Read More

The Vanderbilt Master of Public Health program has a full slate of free campus events planned for National Public Health Week. Read More

Proposed Medicaid reforms are similar to the capped federal financing system in place during the '50s and early '60s, when states generally reimbursed a much smaller proportion of health care for the needy. Read More

Robert Dittus, M.D., MPH, Executive Vice President, Public Health and Health Care for Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC), has been named to the National Advisory Council of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). Read More

The Tennessee Public Health Association and the Tennessee Medical Association are collaborating to establish the “William Schaffner, M.D., Public Health Hero Award,” to be presented annually to an individual who has demonstrated extraordinary efforts in the advancement of public health in Tennessee. Read More