New Faculty in the Department of Medicine

Dr. Agarwal will be an Assistant Professor of Medicine in the Division of Hematology/Oncology at Vanderbilt. He received his undergraduate degree in philosophy from Columbia University and his medical degree from the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine. He then completed his residency training in internal medicine at Duke University Medical Center before completing fellowship training in medical oncology at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK). During his fellowship, Dr. Agarwal developed a specific research interest in how to best utilize the principles of palliative and supportive care for patients with advanced cancer, particularly within the context of rapidly evolving immune-oncology, genomic-driven targeted therapy, and investigational cancer therapeutics. He is the first fellow to pioneer a dual training path and complete a second fellowship in hospice and palliative medicine at MSK. To support his research, he received a 2018 Conquer Cancer Foundation Young Investigator Award from the American Society of Clinical Oncology. 

His clinical interests lie in the treatment of patients with gastrointestinal malignancies. He ultimately plans to build his academic career at Vanderbilt as a gastrointestinal medical oncologist and clinical investigator, to design and conduct patient-focused research that aims to improve comprehensive cancer care and inform new paradigms for the integration of palliative care and oncology.

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Dr. Barker is interested in developing a more effective battlefield tourniquet. As an Officer in the U.S. Army Reserve in conjunction with several other officers, he is assisting in developing a battlefield/traumatic amputation program for simulated training. He enjoys all aspects of acute care medicine and family medicine and continually strives to become a better, more well-rounded physician through active learning. When given the chance, he enjoys working with and training NP/PA/medical students and residents.

Dr. Emily Barker graduated from Tulane University School of Medicine in 2002. After completing her training in internal medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Dr. Barker was on the faculty at the University of California in San Diego for two years where she taught third-year medical students during their internal medicine rotation and served as Co-Medical Director of VA San Diego's Systems Redesign, a national collaboration for quality improvement in VA hospitals. 

In 2009, Dr. Barker co-developed River Oaks Doctors Group (RODG) in Houston, TX, after realizing that modern medicine did not allow her to practice in a way she felt every patient deserved. While at RODG and continuing today, she thrives on close and lasting relationships with her patients as though they are family. Every text and phone call she receives gives her confidence in the care she is providing to her patients. She knows who they are, what medications they are taking, and who their families are. Dr. Barker believes nothing is more rewarding than making a difference in the life of someone who has entrusted his or her health and well-being to her.

Dr. Barker is married to Dr. Colin Barker, and they have four children and two dogs.

Dr. Bowers received her bachelor's degree from Duke University in Durham, NC, and her medical degree from Emory University in Atlanta, GA. After completing her internal medicine residency at Baylor School of Medicine, she remained in Houston, TX, to join a large, private, multi-specialty physician group. There, she spent seven years as a primary care physician, including call for inpatient admissions and being a clinical instructor for internal medicine residents at Baylor. Dr. Bowers and her family relocated to Fort Myers, FL, between 2017-2019 where she practiced outpatient medicine for a federally qualified healthcare center (FQHC) that supported the uninsured and under-insured community. She looks forward to bringing her experience to Vanderbilt from working in a variety of healthcare settings, in various clinical roles, and with diverse patient populations.

Clinical interests include preventive health care and behavioral health integration.

Dr. Chichetto is a formally trained social worker and epidemiologist in the areas of alcohol use and health outcomes among high-risk populations, with a focus on persons living with HIV (PLWH). Her primary focus as an epidemiologist is investigating the health implications of common behavioral syndemics, particularly concurrent unhealthy alcohol use, cigarette smoking, and depressive symptoms. Her primary career goal is to improve health outcomes (e.g., cardiovascular disease) associated with behavioral health conditions among PLWH and other clinical populations. She plans to establish an interdisciplinary research program designed to develop and evaluate interventions for those with multiple behavioral conditions. Dr. Chichetto is specifically interested in bridging the gap between mechanistic research and implementation science by focusing on biologically informed pathways (e.g., the gut microbiome) for interventions to reduce inflammation, and by extension, end organ disease (e.g., CVD) that can treat and/or prevent the impact of behavioral syndemics. She is skilled in both qualitative and quantitative research methods. She has used qualitative approaches to understand and conceptualize the state of alcohol use screening and treatment in primary HIV care. Moreover, she specializes in longitudinal data analysis including multivariate analyses (i.e., mixed effects modeling, generalized estimating equations, and structural equation modeling), time-to-event analyses (i.e., Cox proportional hazard modeling), and pattern analyses (i.e., group-based trajectory modeling).

Michelle Chi is Assistant Professor of Clinical Medicine in the Division of Hematology/Oncology. She received her BS in biology from the University of Tennessee in Knoxville and her MD from the Tennessee Center for Health Science in Memphis. Dr. Chi’s clinical interest in is in benign hematology, particularly in hemostasis and thrombosis with a focus on women’s health and transition of care between pediatric and adult hematology.

Dr. Das’ research interests lie in the gastrointestinal (GI) cancer and phase I space. They revolve around designing early phase studies taking advantage of salvage DNA repair pathway dependence in biomarker selected GI tumors and overcoming the immunosuppressive tumor microenvironment in refractory tumors through mechanism-based immunotherapy combinations. Clinically, he takes care of patients with advanced GI malignancies with a specific interest in those with neuroendocrine tumors and colorectal, pancreatic, and gastric adenocarcinoma. Dr. Das is currently pursuing a Master in Science and Clinical Investigation (MSCI) through Vanderbilt University Medical Center and the K12 VCORCDP grant. He completed an early phase externship at CTEP (investigational drugs branch) and participated in the FDA ASCO Fellow’s Day program. He has been fortunate to present at several national meetings including ASCO, GI ASCO, and ECOG. Outside of work he enjoys curling up with an interesting read, watching a crime or mob-oriented movie, sampling new restaurants, and playing with his toy poodle, Lucy.

Sudden cardiac death (SCD) claims more lives each year than all other causes of death combined. The underlying mechanisms remain unclear, precluding the design of new, more effective therapies. Progress in understanding SCD mechanisms has been limited by the lack of a suitable animal model resembling the human phenotype. While reactive oxygen species (ROS) have been strongly implicated in the pathogenesis of both SCD and heart failure (HF), insight into the mechanistic role has been limited by the lack of sophisticated tools. Dr. Dey’s work reveals important new mechanistic and therapeutic insights with potential for broad clinical translation. Her studies have demonstrated that antioxidant flux depends on mitochondrial substrate catabolism with the availability of NADPH as a major rate controlling step. Further, she developed several unique and highly clinically-relevant animal models, including the first female model of non-ischemic HF with spontaneous SCD. Additional studies by Dr. Dey have revealed that mitochondrial ROS (mROS) is the principal driver for SCD. Importantly, she also demonstrated that scavenging mROS in vivo mitigates SCD and reverses HF. Her ongoing research is aimed at dissecting the mechanisms by which chronic elevations in sympathetic activity induce mROS-mediated adverse remodeling in the heart, leading to HF and increased risk of SCD. Her research program focuses on the design of potential new in vivo therapies for HF and SCD by reducing sympathetic stress-mediated adverse remodeling in the heart (e.g., using gene therapy to convert sympathetic nerves to parasympathetic nerves, device-based stimulation of sympathetic nerves). Dr. Dey’s goal is to form strong, long-term collaborations to employ a multidisciplinary translational approach to address questions of clinical significance related to HF and SCD.

In addition to glucose, breast tumors often utilize glutamine to support biomass and energetic requirements for cell proliferation and migration. While glutamine not only drives breast cancer cell growth, it is also a necessary amino acid for normal cell function for a wide range of other cells within the human body, including immune cells that target and kill cancer cells. Dr. Edwards' primary research focus is to investigate the microenvironmental role of glutamine metabolism in regulating tumor immunity and metastatic progression in breast cancer.

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Dr. Fine's interests include adult medicine and geriatrics. Dr. Fine was the Director of the Internal Medicine Externship Program at Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine from 2013-2016.

Dr. Jayani specializes in caring for adults with hematologic malignancies with a focus on blood and marrow transplantation and cellular immunotherapy. She is passionate about improving the care of older adults with hematologic malignancies receiving these intensive therapies. She is also interested in the importance of physical activity in patients receiving transplant and cellular immunotherapy.

Dr. Kroncke is a promising young scientist whose research focus has been to explain the interplay between membrane protein flexibility and structure that leads to robust function and dysfunction involved in human disease, with a special emphasis on ion channels involved in the heart contraction cycle. The increasing use of next generation sequencing in the clinical arena is uncovering a large number of variants across all genes, but methods to predict their pathogenicity are not well established. This results in an increasing number of “variants of uncertain significance” (VUSs), a major emerging problem in genomic medicine. Rare variants (mutations) in the cardiac ion channels are implicated in diverse heart diseases, including long QT syndrome (LQTS), short QT syndrome (SQTS), and Brugada syndrome (BrS), but are also common in healthy populations. While multiple algorithms predict whether ion channel variants are deleterious (SIFT, PolyPhen-2, PredSNP, CADD, etc.), too many neutral variants are classified as disease-causing. The long-term research interest of Dr. Kroncke is to improve our understanding of the clinical burden of ion channel non-synonymous single nucleotide polymorphisms (nsSNPs) on carriers. He believes predicting protein-specific functional phenotypes accurately of nsSNPs within these genes is the best path to reaching this goal, initially focused on ion channels associated with Long QT Syndrome.

Dr. Lewis was born and raised in rural Illinois. She obtained a BS degree from the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana and her MD from Southern Illinois University School of Medicine. She completed her internal medicine residency training at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). She stayed on at UIC for an additional year as Chief Resident. When deciding future career goals, she and her husband made a leap of faith and chose to move away from their home state. They migrated south to Nashville, taking advantage of the outdoors while also having the amenities of city life. She has a passion for bedside ultrasound, clinical education and teaching trainees, and serving vulnerable and under-served populations.

Leslie was born and raised in Utah and earned her B.S. in Molecular Biophysics & Biochemistry from Yale University in New Haven, CT. Her undergraduate research in the lab of Dr. Paul Forscher looked a cytoskeleton dynamics in growth cones. She completed her MD/PhD at Vanderbilt University. Her PhD thesis work in the lab of Dr. Steve Hanks focused on the role of p130Cas signaling in focal adhesion dynamics and cellular motility. She remained at Vanderbilt to complete Internal Medicine Residency and is currently an Infectious Disease Fellow. She will be joining the lab of Dr. Matthew Tyska to study the structural role of transmembrane proteins in brush border assembly in gut epithelium and its role in GI microbial homeostasis and immune function. Leslie plans to pursue a career as a physician-scientist.

Reactive oxygen species (ROS) are often damaging compounds that can contribute to tissue injury and inflammation in the context of inflammatory bowel disease and colorectal cancers. However, ROS is also crucial for maintaining normal tissue homeostasis, and recent data have indicated that the exact role of ROS and antioxidants in intestinal homeostasis and disease is quite complex and likely highly contextual. Dr. Short’s research focuses on a family of antioxidant proteins known as the glutathione peroxidases and how they modify intestinal stem cell function, immune responses, and epithelial restitution using a variety of mouse models, as well as novel 3D patient-derived organoids. Ultimately, this work will yield a greater understanding of how individual antioxidant proteins modify redox homeostasis and contribute to intestinal health.

Dr. Gitanjali Srivastava is an Obesity Medicine Specialist (formerly at Florida Hospital) and Founding Director of the Center for Obesity Medicine, a successful multidisciplinary and specialized hospital-affiliated adult and pediatric practice established in late 2013. In 2017, she joined Boston University as the Director of the Obesity Medicine and Nutrition Fellowship Program and Obesity Medicine Education and then went on to become Co-Chair of the Obesity Medicine Fellowship Development Committee as part of the Obesity Medicine Council of Fellowship Directors in 2018. She is past Chair of the Clinical Management Section of the Obesity Society and former Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of Central Florida College of Medicine in Orlando, Florida. She is triple-board-certified in internal medicine, pediatrics, and obesity medicine. 

Dr. Srivastava has special interests in advancing multidisciplinary treatment of obesity and its complications, obesity pharmacotherapy, pregnancy and obesity (women’s health), pediatric weight management, and clinical engineering of obesity care models. She earned her medical degree from Louisiana State University School of Medicine in New Orleans and completed her residency in the combined internal medicine and pediatrics program at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. Dr. Srivastava received advanced training in obesity medicine and clinical nutrition during her fellowship at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston. While completing her fellowship at Massachusetts General Hospital, Dr. Srivastava spear-headed the first American Board of Obesity Medicine Curriculum for Fellows and the Blackburn Board Review Component. She is a 2012 Diplomate of the American Board of Obesity Medicine.

Cosby Allen Stone, Jr., received his baccalaureate degree, magna cum laude, in mathematics from Vanderbilt University in 2004. He obtained his MD and MPH degrees in 2010 from the University of Alabama Schools of Medicine and Public Health, Birmingham, Alabama. During this period (2008-2009), he worked in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania, supported as a Fogarty International Clinical Research Scholar. He did his internship and residency at Yale in internal medicine and pediatrics, serving as chief resident in 2014. In July of 2014, Dr. Stone entered the Vanderbilt fellowship training program in allergy and immunology and completed that program in June of 2019. Dr. Stone has expertise in epidemiology, clinical drug allergy, and translational mechanistic projects in drug and vaccine allergy. Dr. Stone is engaged in pioneering clinical/translational research specifically focused on beta lactam antibiotic allergies with a secondary interest in immediate excipient allergies to alpha-gal and polyethylene glycols/polysorbates. Dr. Stone has been lauded for his human touch as a clinician. He is not only an exceptional physician, but his warm, personal style, combined with a tireless, solid commitment to his patients, contribute to his effectiveness on the whole. He has been interviewed more than 10 times by regional print and television media and nationally by National Geographic, US News and World Report, the NPR radio network, and the New York Times. He is fluent in Spanish and has a strong interest in languages, poetry, writing, and history.

Dr. Anil Trindade is Assistant Professor of Medicine and Associate Medical Director for Lung Transplant at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. He received his MD degree from Duke University and went on to complete his residency at Johns Hopkins University. Following residency, he completed fellowship training in pulmonary and critical care medicine at Harvard Medical School. During this period, he worked under the mentorship of prominent Harvard professor, Dr. Elizabeth Henske, Director of the Center for LAM Research and Clinical Care and Co-Director of the Pulmonary Genetics Center. Dr. Trindade was appointed to the Harvard Medical School faculty in 2012, rejoining in 2017 after serving in private practice and at Tufts University and Columbia.  After returning to Harvard, he was appointed Associate Medical Director of the Lung Transplant Program at Brigham and Women's Hospital. Dr. Trindade has a deep and broad knowledge of pulmonary and critical care medicine and lung transplantation. His record as a clinician reflects numerous clinical innovations, all designed for quality improvement in patient care. At Harvard he began a deliberate effort to improve patient outcomes, developing care algorithms to an area of pulmonary medicine historically lacking any evidence-based approaches. His dedication to seeking answers and to question existing care paradigms allowed the development of multiple care “pathways,” which lead to significant standardization and improvement of care. Dr. Trindade has extensive experience in classroom teaching, clinical supervision, and teaching of residents and fellows. He has received honors and awards steadily throughout his academic career, including Phi Beta Kappa, an Honors' Thesis from Duke, an ATS travel award, and a recognition for Excellence in Tutoring from Harvard Medical School.

Dr. Juliana Yang is an Assistant Professor at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center in the Division of Gastroenterology. She completed medical school and internal medicine training at the Medical College of Wisconsin, followed by fellowship in gastroenterology and hepatology at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. After her GI fellowship, she completed a two-year fellowship in advanced and therapeutic endoscopy at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. She is trained in endoscopic procedures including ERCP, diagnostic and therapeutic EUS, endoscopic mucosal resection, enteral stenting, and a wide range of other advanced GI procedures.

Dr. Yang has special training and interest in weight loss therapies and is excited to be able to offer these therapies to patients. Procedures performed include endoscopic sleeve gastroplasty (ESG) and transoral outlet reduction (TORe), as well as other emerging therapies in bariatric and therapeutic endoscopy.

Dr. Yang is fluent in English and Chinese (Mandarin). She has spoken at multiple national and international conferences and has authored more the 30 publications published in peer-reviewed journals.