Karen Bloch, M.D., MPH, FIDSA

Karen Bloch is Associate Professor of Health Policy and Medicine (Infectious Diseases) at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.  Dr. Bloch graduated from medical school at the University of Virginia (MD, 1990).  She completed internship and residency at Yale-New Haven Hospital (New Haven, CT) in 1993, and infectious disease fellowship at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) in 1997.  She received her Master’s in Public Health (MPH) from the University of California, Berkeley in 1996.  She is board certified in Infectious Diseases.   

Her research interests include infections of the central nervous system and arthropod-borne infections.  She has been an investigator on several Emerging Infections Program (EIP) studies sponsored by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and is currently a co-investigator for a study evaluating for novel and emerging tick-borne pathogens in Tennessee.

She has been awarded the William Schaffner Teaching award in infectious diseases in 2003, 2008, and 2011.  She has contributed to the Infectious Diseases Society of America guidelines on the management of encephalitis (2008) and co-authored the International Encephalitis Consortium recommendations on the case definition for encephalitis (2013).