Faculty Mentors

My expertise centers on adaptive and Bayesian clinical trials, which include platform trials; translational, clinical, health services, and outcomes research; interim data analysis; data monitoring committees; and informed consent in emergency research studies. These clinical trial designs use the incoming stream of information that exists during the conduct of a clinical trial to trigger changes in key clinical trial characteristics to improve the ethical balance, statistical efficiency, or scientific value of the trial relative to a fixed, non-adaptive trial design. Pubmed Bibliography.

My research interests include resuscitation, prehospital medicine, and adaptive clinical trial design. I am a site investigator for the SIREN research network at Harbor-UCLA. In the past few months, I have focused my efforts on COVID-19 surge modeling for the county of Los Angeles. Pubmed Bibliography.

I am the interim CEO of The Lundquist Institute for Biomedical Innovation at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, and theformer Medical Director for the Los Angeles County Emergency Medical Services (EMS) Agency. My research interests include EMS, prehospital care of children, and pediatric emergency medicine. My key studies include a study of prehospital airway management for children published in JAMA 2000 and the National Pediatric Readiness Project published in JAMA–Pediatrics in 2015. Pubmed Bibliography.

I am dual-boarded in Emergency Medicine and Clinical Informatics, and have two Masters to match (Clinical Research Methods and Translational Science). I am core faculty at the UCLA CTSI for the Community Engaged Research Program as well as Biomedical Informatics. I have received funding through NIH, CDC, PCORI, and various foundations, most recently Co-PI for the Southwest SIREN Hub, to perform nationwide emergency care clinical trials.

I seek to leverage technology and implementation science to perform collaborative health services research focused on improving patient and provider decision-making. I partner with the community to carry out mutually meaningful research with an emphasis on social determinants of health. Pubmed Bibliography.

As physician lead for Emergency Medicine for the electronic health record of the LA County Department of Health Services (DHS), my interests include using large clinical datasets for research. Seeing over 400,000 ED patients annually, the three emergency departments of LA DHS share a single electronic health record and provide a wealth of data for researchers at Harbor-UCLA. Recent projects include antibiotic and opioid stewardship interventions, national epidemiology of firearms injuries, pediatric appendicitis, and trauma epidemiology. Pubmed Bibliography.

I currently serve as the Director of the Institute for Health Services and Outcomes Research at the Lundquist Institute for Biomedical Innovation at Harbor-UCLA. My academic areas of focus include acute presentation of pediatric chronic diseases, technology use in ED aftercare, health policy, and emergency medical services for children. I have received grant funding through foundations, CTSI, the NIH, and most recently, from HRSA.

I serve as a member of the executive core and one of three national leads for the knowledge management domain for the HRSA-funded EMS for Children Innovation and Improvement Center program. I also serve as a member of the dissemination committee for the Pediatric Emergency Care Applied Research Network (PECARN), representing the EIIC. Pubmed Bibliography.

My research interests include Pediatric Emergency Medicine, study design, and translation of medical research via educational methods such as podcasting, FOAMed, and Pediatric Emergency Playbook. Pubmed Bibliography.

The group comprises Dennis Hsieh, MD, JD; Shamsher Samra MD, MPhil; Kabir Yadav, MD, MS, MSHS; Mohsen Saidinejad, MD, MBA; Adedamola Ogunniyi, MD; and Kian Preston-Suni, MD, MPH. They collaborate on several projects related to issues surrounding social emergency medicine and the social determinants of health, and they work closely with Juliana Tolles, MD, MHS and Ross Fleischman, MD, MCR to develop research plans and evaluate these projects.