Vanderbilt University School of Medicine

Vanderbilt University School of Medicine

Type	Private
Established	1875
Parent institution	Vanderbilt University
Endowment	US$551 Million
Dean	Jeff Balser
Academic staff	2,718 (1,630 full-time, 996 part-time/voluntary, and 92 emeritus)
Students	1029 Total 434 MD 501 PhD 88 MD-PhD 4 MD-MBA 1 MD-JD 1 MD-MPH
Location	Nashville, TN, USA
Campus	Urban
Website	medschool.vanderbilt.edu

Vanderbilt University School of Medicine is a medical school located in Nashville, Tennessee. Located in the Vanderbilt University Medical Center on the southeastern side of the Vanderbilt University campus, the School of Medicine claims two Nobel laureates: Earl Wilbur Sutherland, Jr., in 1971, for his discovery of the metabolic regulating compound cyclic AMP, and Stanley Cohen, in 1986, for his discovery with a colleague of epidermal growth factor.

The first diplomas issued by Vanderbilt University were to 61 Doctors of Medicine in February 1875, thanks to an arrangement that recognized the University of Nashville's medical school as serving both institutions. The arrangement continued for 20 more years, until the school was reorganized under the control of the Board of Trustees. In the early days, the School of Medicine was owned and operated as a private property of the practicing physicians who composed the faculty and received the fees paid by students. Vanderbilt made no financial contribution to the school's support and exercised no control over admission requirements, the curriculum, or standards for graduation. In 1925, when the school moved from the old South Campus across town to the main campus, thus integrating instruction in the medical sciences with the rest of the university.

As of March 2014, the institution is being sued by the federal government in a whistle-blower case for a decade-long Medicare fraud scheme. In May 2015, a federal court ruled that the Vanderbilt University Medical Center was in violation of the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act for laying off 200 employees without adequate notice and would have to pay out $400,000, pending an appeal. Finally, the university admitted that one of its scientists fraudulently falsified six years of biomedical research in high-profile journals.

The Vanderbilt University Medical Center is the only Level I Trauma Center in Middle Tennessee. The following units comprise VUMC:

With over 21,500 employees (including 2,876 full-time faculty), Vanderbilt is the largest private employer in Middle Tennessee and the second largest in the state (after FedEx, headquartered in Memphis). Approximately 74% of the university's faculty and staff are employed by the Medical Center.