Professor

Dr. Vance Garrison Fowler Jr is Florence McAlister Distinguished Professor of Medicine and Professor of Molecular Genetics and Microbiology in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Duke University. Dr. Fowler’s research in S. aureus and antibacterial resistance has led to >20 years (1999-2026) of continuous NIH funding as PI. According to the Blue Ridge Institute for Medical Research, he has been in the top 30 Internal Medicine PIs for total NIH funding to US Medical Schools consistently since 2014. He has been the Contact PI of the Antibacterial Resistance Leadership Group (ARLG) since the inception of a grant with a total value of over $160 million to conduct clinical research in antibacterial resistance, since its inception in 2013. Under Dr. Fowler’s leadership, the ARLG went from creation in 2013 to over 40 studies involving >21,000 patients from >130 sites in 12 countries producing >120 publications and 2 FDA approvals. He created the S. aureus Bacteremia (SAB) Group, one of the world’s largest prospective biorepositories of SAB.

He is a co-founder of the International Collaboration on Endocarditis (ICE) and published the critical observation that S. aureus is now the leading cause of endocarditis in the industrialized world. He was the lead author on the Phase III trial that led to the FDA indication of daptomycin for SAB (Fowler NEJM, 2006), on the multinational trial of Merck V710 vaccine for S. aureus (Fowler JAMA 2013), and the Phase II trial of Bacteriophage-derived lysins for S. aureus bacteremia (Fowler J Clin Invest 2020).

He was the senior author on 2 Phase II trials of immunotherapeutic treatments of SAB, a randomized trial on staphylococcal bacteremia (Holland JAMA, 2018), and the recently completed Phase III of ceftobiprole for S. aureus bacteremia (Holland, NEJM, 2023). He has led multiple clinical studies involving the Karius test in S. aureus bacteremia (Eichenberger, Clin Infect Dis 2022) and endocarditis (Eichenberger, Clin Infect Dis, 2023). He received the Clinical Research Achievement Award for publishing one of the top ten clinical research papers in the US in 2012, and the Translational Research Mentoring Award from Duke University School of Medicine in 2018. He has over 350 peer-reviewed publications, over 33,000 citations, and a Web of Science h-index of 89.