Division of Rheumatology and Immunology

Research Centers and Labs


Research Centers and Programs

  • Vanderbilt Systemic Sclerosis Hand Program: Our goal is to provide outstanding multidisciplinary care for patients with systemic sclerosis and to advance research to develop therapies to treat hand impairment.  
  • Vanderbilt Psoriatic Arthritis and Spondyloarthritis Center: Our mission is to provide outstanding multidisciplinary care to patients with psoriatic arthritis and spondyloarthritis, increase awareness and advance patient-centered research.
  • Vanderbilt Vasculitis Center: Our goal is to advance high impact research in vasculitis, provide exceptional multidisciplinary care to patients with vasculitis, and provide educational programs to increase awareness of vasculitis.

Research Labs

  • Aune Lab: Our research focuses on the use of functional genomic and epigenetic approaches to understand gene regulation.
  • Bonami Lab: Our overarching goal is to identify mechanisms by which autoantigen-specific B lymphocytes breach immune tolerance barriers to drive autoimmune disease.
  • Boothby Lab: Understanding signal transduction and transcription regulation mechanisms that control our immunity against microbes - or lead to autoimmunity or cancer when the balance goes awry.
  • Crofford Lab: To understand rheumatic disease heterogeneity thus advance personalized care of patients with systemic autoimmune inflammatory and musculoskeletal diseases.
  • Jin Chen Lab: Our laboratory investigates the role of Eph receptor tyrosine kinases and their ligands, ephrins, in tumor metabolism, cancer metastasis, and tumor angiogenesis.
  • Major Lab: The broad research focus of our laboratory is to understand immunological mechanisms of autoimmunity and how it accelerates cardiovascular disease, specifically atherosclerosis.
  • Ormseth Lab: Our studies seek to determine the underlying cause of the increased cardiovascular risk for those with rheumatoid arthritis
  • C. Michael Stein Lab: Major focus areas in the lab are: inflammation and cardiovascular disease, cardiovascular pharmacogenetics, pharmacogenetics and drug response, and drug safety.