Russell L. Rothman, MD, MPP

Dr. Rothman is Professor of Internal Medicine, Pediatrics and Health Policy, Ingram Professor of Integrative and Population Health, and the Senior Vice President for Population and Public Health at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. He also serves as the Director of the Institute for Medicine and Public Health and Associate Dean for Population Health Sciences. The Institute for Medicine and Public Health engages over 250 faculty involved in research and education related to global health, epidemiology, health services research, health policy, biomedical ethics, biostatistics, and other fields. Key areas of research include implementation science, population health, behavioral research, health disparities, quality improvement, learning health system approaches, and other areas aimed at improving health outcomes. Dr. Rothman is an expert in health services research and health communication. His research focuses on improving care for adult and pediatric patients with diabetes, obesity and other chronic diseases. His research focuses on addressing health communication, health literacy/numeracy, and other social and behavioral factors to improve health. He has been the Principal Investigator on over $100 million in funded research and has authored over 200 publications (h index 67). He is currently the Principal Investigator of the STAR (Stakeholders, Technology and Research) Clinical Research Network, which engages Vanderbilt, Meharry, Duke, UNC, Wake Forest, Health Sciences of South Carolina, Essentia, Mayo, and Stanford in real world evidence and pragmatic research and includes electronic health data on over 15 million patients. Dr. Rothman served as Chair of the PCORI PCORnet Executive Steering Committee, a national network of over 60 health systems that supports comparative effectiveness research and pragmatic clinical trials. Dr. Rothman served as the Co-Chair of the Steering Committee of the ADAPTABLE study, a pragmatic clinical trial that enrolled 15,000 patients to evaluate the optimal dose of aspirin in secondary prevention of heart disease. Dr. Rothman also served as Co-Chair of the Steering Committee of the Healthcare workers Exposure Response and Outcomes (HERO)Study, which includes a national registry of over 50,000 participants and supports clinical trials of healthcare workers and COVID19. Dr. Rothman is a practicing primary care physician, and previously served as the Chief of the Internal/Medicine Pediatrics Section. He also served as the Principal Investigator of the CMS funded Mid-South Practice Transformation Network which engaged 4,000 clinicians across over 100 practices in quality improvement efforts. Dr. Rothman is also the past president of the Academy of Communication in Healthcare (ACH).