Hilary A. Tindle, MD, MPH, is a tenured Professor of Medicine in the Division of General Internal Medicine and Public Health at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. She is the founding director of the Vanderbilt Center for Tobacco Addiction and Lifestyle (ViTAL), holds the William Anderson Spickard, Jr., MD, Chair in Medicine, and is a member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation (ASCI).
Dr. Tindle leads a translational research program focused on developing and testing interventions for nicotine dependence. Since 2014, she has served as principal investigator (PI/MPI) on five R01 grants and one U01 grant. She has authored or co-authored 195 publications, with work appearing in high-impact general medical journals (e.g., JAMA and the JAMA Network journals) as well as leading addiction journals (e.g., Nicotine & Tobacco Research and Addiction).
Her epidemiologic research in the Framingham Heart Study, examining life-course smoking exposure and risk of lung cancer and cardiovascular disease, has contributed to changes in clinical risk assessment guidelines. She is a sought-after speaker who has presented her work locally, nationally, and internationally. Since 2015, she has served as an NIH grant reviewer, including as a standing member of the Interventions to Prevent and Treat Addiction (IPTA) study section, and has also served as an ad hoc reviewer for the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) and the Wellcome Trust.
Dr. Tindle led the implementation chapter of the National Cancer Institute’s Tobacco Control Monograph No. 23, part of the Cancer Moonshot Initiative, and serves as a senior editor for the forthcoming Surgeon General’s Report on tobacco use among individuals with mental health conditions and substance use disorders.
She has mentored 30 trainees, most of whom have pursued research-related careers, and is the contact PI of a newly awarded NIDA K12 program to train the next generation of addiction researchers. As the founding medical director of the VUMC Tobacco Treatment Service, she has overseen more than 13,000 consults since 2015 and has leveraged these clinical programs to recruit over 1,400 VUMC patients into cancer prevention trials.