Photo
Language
English
Title and Department
Associate Professor
Department of Medicine; Division of Genetic Medicine
Professional bio
Jeffrey Smith, MD, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Medicine within the Division of Genetic Medicine, Department of Medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. He is a faculty member of the Vanderbilt Ingram Cancer Center and of the Vanderbilt Genetics Institute.
He received his MD from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center and PhD in the Department of Molecular Genetics under Drs. Michael Brown and Joseph Goldstein, deciphering the classical transcriptional feedback regulatory system of cholesterol metabolism. He completed an Internal Medicine residency at the University of Michigan in the ABIM Clinical Investigator Track, and a Post-Doctoral Fellowship with Dr. Francis Collins at the National Human Genome Research Institute, National Institutes of Health, pioneering hereditary prostate cancer genetics.
Dr. Smith’s research as tenured faculty at Vanderbilt has elucidated heritable causes of cancer, for which he received the US Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. His Nashville Familial Prostate Cancer Study, which included 2,300 men, was the first conceived and conducted under the familial case-control study design. He has collaborated with global investigators to dissect the strong but complex heritability of prostate cancer, contributing to one of the principal global GWAS of prostate cancer. Dr. Smith has also investigated heritable causes of breast cancer in several global collaborations.
In Dr. Smith’s Vanderbilt research lab, his team developed genetic resources for the zebrafish model organism, including two million discovered genetic variants and a corresponding genetic map, which he then used to first reveal its genetic mechanism of sex determination. His active research encompasses whole genome investigation of familial prostate cancer, as well as precision oncology prediction of cancer patient outcome. He and Vanderbilt colleagues have discovered that tumor mutation burden is strongly predictive of patient survival, independently of the traditional indices of anatomic stage and histologic grade. Dr. Smith serves on the Vanderbilt's BioVU biobank Oversight Board, and as Institutional Review Board Chair.
He received his MD from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center and PhD in the Department of Molecular Genetics under Drs. Michael Brown and Joseph Goldstein, deciphering the classical transcriptional feedback regulatory system of cholesterol metabolism. He completed an Internal Medicine residency at the University of Michigan in the ABIM Clinical Investigator Track, and a Post-Doctoral Fellowship with Dr. Francis Collins at the National Human Genome Research Institute, National Institutes of Health, pioneering hereditary prostate cancer genetics.
Dr. Smith’s research as tenured faculty at Vanderbilt has elucidated heritable causes of cancer, for which he received the US Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. His Nashville Familial Prostate Cancer Study, which included 2,300 men, was the first conceived and conducted under the familial case-control study design. He has collaborated with global investigators to dissect the strong but complex heritability of prostate cancer, contributing to one of the principal global GWAS of prostate cancer. Dr. Smith has also investigated heritable causes of breast cancer in several global collaborations.
In Dr. Smith’s Vanderbilt research lab, his team developed genetic resources for the zebrafish model organism, including two million discovered genetic variants and a corresponding genetic map, which he then used to first reveal its genetic mechanism of sex determination. His active research encompasses whole genome investigation of familial prostate cancer, as well as precision oncology prediction of cancer patient outcome. He and Vanderbilt colleagues have discovered that tumor mutation burden is strongly predictive of patient survival, independently of the traditional indices of anatomic stage and histologic grade. Dr. Smith serves on the Vanderbilt's BioVU biobank Oversight Board, and as Institutional Review Board Chair.