Wesley

H.

Self

MD, MPH

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 Health. In these roles, he is a leader for clinical and translational research efforts at Vanderbilt and within several multicenter national and international research networks.

Prior to promotion to his institutional and health system positions, Dr. Self 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 U.S. 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 early career investigators.

He has published over 370 peer-reviewed manuscripts, including over 30 manuscripts in The New England Journal of Medicine and JAMA. He has received over $500 million in research funding, including major awards from NIH, CDC, DoD, PCORI, foundations, and industry partners. In 2024 and 2025, he was the most highly funded investigator by the NIH in the U.S. in the field of emergency medicine.

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, precision 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, NEJM 2018), host response to severe infection (Nature Medicine 2025, JAMA 2023, JAMA 2020), respiratory failure (JAMA 2024; NEJM 2022), intubation techniques (NEJM 2026, NEJM 2024, NEJM 2023, JAMA 2022, NEJM 2019), respiratory virus vaccines and therapeutics (JAMA 2025, JAMA 2024, BMJ 2022, NEJM 2021, JAMA 2021, JAMA 2015), medical management of appendicitis (NEJM 2020), ARDS therapeutics (NEJM 2019), and pneumonia epidemiology (NEJM 2015). He has served as the coordinating center principal investigator for many national and international research studies, including the CDC-funded Investigating Respiratory Viruses in the Acutely Ill (IVY) Network for respiratory infection epidemiologic work, the NIH-funded Nashville International Coordinating Center for clinical trials, and the NIH-funded ARDS, Pneumonia, and Sepsis (APS) Consortium for deep phenotyping work. He founded a multisite national clinical research network called BEACON (Biomedical Emergency, Acute, Critical care, and Observational Network) [beacontrials.org]

Dr. Self completed 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 a Master of Public Health degree and clinical research fellowships.