Dr. Sten Vermund has been named assistant vice chancellor for Global Health at Vanderbilt University.

Dr. Vermund, the Amos Christie Professor of Global Health, directs the Vanderbilt Institute for Global Health, and is professor in the department of pediatrics. He is known for his projects aimed at HIV/AIDS prevention, care and treatment, HPV/cervix cancer prevention, and on maternal and child health in low resource regions. A member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies of Science, Dr. Vermund is known for leading international projects in Zambia, Mozambique, Nigeria, China and elsewhere. He also has spearheaded efforts to increase childhood immunization rates and to ease the burden of tropical and childhood diseases.

[Photo: Dr. Sten Vermund]

In the newly created position, Dr. Vermund will lead development and implementation of the Medical Center’s strategic vision for global health, said Dr. Robert Dittus, associate vice chancellor for Public Health and Health Care.

An international focus is particularly important for an academic medical center like Vanderbilt, said Dr. Vermund, because it strengthens its ability to fully achieve its three-part mission: research, teaching and service.

Before coming to Vanderbilt in 2005, Dr. Vermund served as chief of the vaccine trials and epidemiology branch of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases’ AIDS Division, and then as chairman of Epidemiology, director of Geographic Medicine, and director of the Sparkman Center for Global Health at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

Dr. Vermund and colleague Dr. Douglas Heimburger are co-principal investigators of the Vanderbilt-Emory-Cornell-Duke Fogarty Global Health Fellowship program, funded through the Fogarty International Center of the National Institutes of Health.

This announcement was published in Reporter.

Read more: http://news.vanderbilt.edu/2015/04/vermund-named-assistant-vice-chancellor-for-global-health/