Wesley H. Self, MD, MPH, is the Senior Vice President for Clinical Research, Director of the Vanderbilt Institute for Clinical and Translational Research (VICTR), and Principal Investigator for the Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. In these roles, he leads clinical and translational research efforts at Vanderbilt and within several multicenter research networks, with a focus on team science and collaboration. Prior to promotion to his institutional and medical center positions, he served as the Vice Chair for Research in the Department of Emergency Medicine and helped develop it into one of the most productive emergency care research groups in the US. Dr. Self remains active in the Department of Emergency Medicine, where he works clinical shifts, participates in a broad range of its academic programs, and mentors junior investigators.

Dr. Self has published over 270 peer-reviewed manuscripts, including over 25 manuscripts in The New England Journal of Medicine and JAMA. He has received over $400 million in research funding, including major awards from NIH, CDC, DoD, PCORI, foundations, and industry partners.

Dr. Self’s research focuses on developing and testing strategies for improving the care of patients with sepsis, lung infections, ARDS, and related conditions. He designs and conducts late-stage clinical trials, effectiveness studies, and epidemiology platforms. He also focuses on building research infrastructure to facilitate the conduct of highly impactful biomedical research by many investigators and research teams. This work, which focuses on optimizing team science, includes protocol development, regulatory oversight, site recruitment, development of standardized operating procedures, creation and deployment of electronic data collection tools, data management, data analysis, and medical writing.

Dr. Self’s research has advanced the methods of pragmatic clinical trials and observational vaccine effectiveness studies. His work has consistently resulted in important findings for patient care, including in the fields of sepsis resuscitation (NEJM 2023), host response therapies to severe infection (JAMA 2023, JAMA 2020), respiratory failure (NEJM 2022), intubation techniques (NEJM 2023, JAMA 2022, NEJM 2019), COVID-19 vaccines and therapeutics (BMJ 2022, NEJM 2021, JAMA 2021), medical management of appendicitis (NEJM 2020), ARDS therapeutics (NEJM 2019), intravenous fluid management (NEJM 2018), influenza vaccine effectiveness (JAMA 2015), and pneumonia epidemiology (NEJM 2015). He is the founder and principal investigator of the CDC-funded Investigating Respiratory Viruses in the Acutely Ill (IVY) Network for observational clinical research and the NIH-funded Nashville International Coordinating Center for clinical trials.

Dr. Self received a Bachelor of Science from Davidson College, his medical degree from the University of Virginia, clinical training in emergency medicine at Northwestern University, and research training at Vanderbilt University through an MPH degree and clinical research fellowships.