Dr. Ann Richmond received her B.S. degree from Northeast Louisiana University, her M.N.S. degree from Louisiana State University, and her Ph.D. in Developmental Biology at Emory University in 1979. She conducted postdoctoral research in Tumor Biology at Emory School of Medicine and then joined the faculty there, rising to the rank of associate professor of Medicine before moving to Vanderbilt in 1989 as a tenured associate professor of Cell Biology and Medicine and as a research career scientist at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Nashville campus. She was promoted to full professor in 1995, and she was appointed professor and vice chair of the Department of Cancer Biology in 2000. Currently, Dr. Richmond is the Ingram Professor and Director of the Program in Cancer Biology. Dr. Richmond is internationally known for her research on chemokines, small “chemotactic” proteins that attract inflammatory cells. She was the first to demonstrate that a chemokine can regulate tumor growth. Her early research involved the purification and sequencing of one of the first known chemokines, CXCL1, and her lab played a major role in the characterization of the role of its receptor, CXCR2, in leukocyte trafficking, inflammation, angiogenesis, wound healing, and tumor progression.
