David Herlie Robertson, M.D., age 76, of Nashville and Dickson County, died peacefully January 12, 2024, at his Nashville home with his wife and daughter by his side.
David grew up in the Sylvia community of Dickson County where his family has lived for generations and where many of his relatives and close family friends still reside. He was the son of the late Herlie and Lucille Luther Robertson, and has been married to Dr. Rose Marie Stevens Robertson since 1978. Their daughter, Rose Marie Robertson Pink was born in 1983.
David graduated from Vanderbilt University in 1969 in Germanic and Slavic Languages and became interested in medicine during his undergraduate years, when he worked in a Clinical Pharmacology laboratory and the Clinical Research Center to help develop an essay for renin, important in high blood pressure. After graduating from Vanderbilt, he attended the Arnamagnaen Institute in Copenhagen, Denmark, pursuing his interest in the Icelandic language, but then returned to Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, where he received his medical degree in 1973. Dr. Robertson completed his internship and residency at Johns Hopkins Hospital and was a post-doctoral fellow in Clinical Pharmacology at Vanderbilt before accepting a position as assistant chief of Service in Medicine and instructor in medicine at Johns Hopkins in 1977.
Once recruited back to the faculty at Vanderbilt, Dr. Robertson pursued both the care of patients and research to develop new treatments that now benefit countless patients, as well as serving for decades as a kind and inspiring teacher to many students and trainees from around the world, including scholars from Russia, Uzbekistan, Brazil, Italy, Slovenia, Taiwan, Austria, Japan and the U.S.
Dr. Robertson’s career at Vanderbilt was multi-faceted. In addition to serving as director of the Clinical Research Center (CRC), where he highly valued working with its caring professional staff. In 1993 he also became director of the Medical Scientist Training Program and served as director of the Division of Movement Disorders in the Department of Neurology. He will be remembered for his work managing the selection and support of the training of many young physician-scientists, many of them now in leadership positions in academia and industry. As director of the CRC, he oversaw scores of clinical research trials. But what he’s best known for nationally and internationally is his own detailed and elegant clinical research into the autonomic nervous system and how it affects the circulation and blood pressure regulation. The quality of his work was recognized with uninterrupted NIH funding for over 30 years, including a Program Project Grant for more than 20 years, and a multicenter Rare Disease Clinical Research Consortium (U54 N065736) with Vanderbilt at the lead of 4 other institutions (Beth Israel-Harvard, Mayo Clinic, New York University, and Intramural NIH).
With colleagues at the Autonomic Center, David discovered two diseases, dopamine-beta-hydroxylase deficiency and norepinephrine reuptake deficiency. He discovered a pharmacological cure for one and a therapy for the other, a great example of clinical pharmacology being applied to human disease therapy. One of those treatments is also now being used as a treatment for forms of orthostatic hypotension that are more commonly seen and used to treat patients with autonomic failure.
David was honored by Vanderbilt with the Grant W. Liddle Award for Leadership in Research (1991), the William J. Darby Award for Innovation in Research (2000) and the Earl W. Sutherland Prize (2007). In 2016 he was awarded by the Council on Hypertension of the American Heart Association with the Irvin Page & Alva Bradley Lifetime Achievement Award, one of the highest honors of the council.
Dr. Robertson will be remembered as a deeply caring physician, someone always deeply interested in other people and their stories, welcoming to everyone.
He loved traveling with his family, gardening, especially growing rare trees, (the monkey puzzle tree and miracle fruit were favorites) and visiting his family farm in Dickson County.
Survivors include his wife; Dr. Rose Marie Robertson, his daughter, Rose Marie Robertson Pink, cousins Jimmy and Norma Robertson and their son Jay, Jim and Teresa Patton, Janice and Gary McCaleb, Ellen and Gus Martinis, Bobby Nicks, Dwayne and Karen Nicks, and Mickey Robertson. David’s extended family includes Misa Fister, Mare Saje and their children Izar and Tara; Alma Fong; Chris Lemus; Nancy, Billy, and Gabby Copeland; David and Lenny Wall; Kale Edmiston; Derek Attig and Ashley Hetrick.
The funeral will be Sunday afternoon, January 21, 2024, visitation at 1:00 p.m. with short service at 2:30 p.m. in the chapel of the Taylor Funeral Home in Dickson County. Rev. April Baker will officiate. His place of rest will be with family at the Pleasant Hill Cemetery in Sylvia Community. In lieu of flowers, please consider support for Nashville Launch Pad (nashvillelaunchpad.com) or the Autonomic Dysfunction Center at Vanderbilt (give.vanderbilthealth.org).
