Vanderbilt Health’s Annet Kirabo, DVM, MSc, PhD, will be honored this fall for her groundbreaking research on immune mechanisms that drive high blood pressure and cardiovascular disease.
Kirabo, Professor of Medicine in the Division of Genetic Medicine and Clinical Pharmacology, will receive the Established Investigator Award for Clinical Hypertension, a new recognition from the American Heart Association’s Council on Hypertension and award sponsor Sky Labs Inc.
The award will be presented Oct. 10 during the American Heart Association’s Hypertension Scientific Session in Arlington, Virginia.
In his nomination letter, Thomas Kleyman, MD, a renowned kidney researcher at the University of Pittsburgh, wrote, “Dr. Kirabo stands out as one of the most innovative, influential, and impactful investigators of her generation.
“Her discoveries have fundamentally transformed our understanding of hypertension pathogenesis and have opened new avenues for therapeutic intervention in cardiovascular and kidney disease,” he wrote.
A native of Uganda, Kirabo earned a doctorate in veterinary medicine at Uganda’s Makerere University and continued her studies in the United States, eventually earning a PhD in physiology and functional genomics from the University of Florida in Gainesville in 2011.
She began to investigate the role of inflammation in hypertension as a postdoctoral research fellow under the mentorship of David Harrison, MD, the Betty and Jack Bailey Professor of Cardiology and Professor of Medicine at Vanderbilt Health.
During this period and continuing after she joined the Vanderbilt faculty in 2015, Kirabo and her colleagues made several important discoveries that, wrote Kleyman, “established a previously unrecognized connection between oxidative stress, adaptive immunity, and hypertension.”
Subsequently, Kirabo and her team identified immune mechanisms of salt-sensitive hypertension that could lead to the development of immunotherapeutic approaches to treatment.
With more than 230 scientific publications, she was ranked as a 2025 Top Scholar by the global academic analytics platform ScholarGPS “in recognition of (her) exceptional productivity, noteworthy impact, and quality of scholarly work” during the preceding five years.
Kirabo, also Associate Professor of Molecular Physiology and Biophysics, previously received an American Heart Association postdoctoral fellowship and in 2020 was honored with the Harry Goldblatt Award for Early Career Investigators. She was named a Fellow of the American Heart Association in 2024.
Based in South Korea, Sky Labs Inc., provides innovative chronic disease management solutions through “CART BP,” the world’s first medical-grade ring-type wearable blood pressure monitor.
