Carlos Grijalva, M.D., M.P.H.

Dr. Grijalva is a tenured Professor at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in the Division of Pharmacoepidemiology, Department of Health Policy. He has appointments as faculty, scholar and/or investigator at the Vanderbilt Epidemiology Center, the Vanderbilt Center for Health Services Research, the Vanderbilt Institute for Global Health, the Vanderbilt Center for Data Science, and the Veterans Affairs Tennessee Valley Geriatric Research Education and Clinical Center (GRECC).

Dr. Grijalva’s research interests include the study of acute respiratory infections, the evaluation of medications and vaccines safety and effectiveness, and methodologies for comparative effectiveness research. He is experienced in the conduct of observational studies of medications and vaccination effects, and his research has been focused on influenza and pneumococcal infections, and more recently SARS-CoV-2, pneumonia, and the evaluation of the effectiveness of vaccination, medications and other preventive programs. His current work is supported by the National Institutes of Health, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, among other sources. He has published more than 220 peer-reviewed articles, many of those in high-impact journals including The New England Journal of Medicine, Lancet, JAMA, Annals of Internal Medicine, Clinical Infectious Diseases, among others. As of mid-April 2021, his publications have accrued more than 16 thousand citations to date, with an H-index of 55 and an i10-index of 152 (https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=DGPe_5sAAAAJ&hl=en). According to Semantic Scholar, his work has resulted in 374 highly influential citations (https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/Carlos-Gabriel-Grijalva/4918860).

He serves as the Co-Principal Investigator for a prospective case-ascertained study designed to assess the transmission of influenza within households in Nashville, TN. This ongoing study has been adapted to study the transmission of SARS-CoV-2 during the ongoing pandemic. He is the Principal Investigator for a new NIH K24 grant that supports mentoring on transmission of viral infections in households. In collaboration with International Investigators, he designed and conducted an international prospective cohort study of young Peruvian children to examine the activity and interactions of common respiratory viruses and colonizing bacteria. His group is currently conducting a pilot study of transmission of viruses and bacteria in households in Lima, Peru. Dr. Grijalva is also the Co-Principal Investigator for the new Vanderbilt PROgRESS (Patient/ Practice Outcomes And Research In Effectiveness And Systems Science) post-doctoral (T32) training program, and he serves as Area Director for the new Vanderbilt Learning Health Systems Scholars (LHSS) K12 training program. He is also the co-Lead for a new Vanderbilt Trans-Institutional Program (TIPs), focused on the study of environmental drivers of antimicrobial resistance.

Dr. Grijalva also maintains an active portfolio of teaching and mentoring activities. He serves as the Course Director for Epidemiology I, Protocol Development and Thesis Research in the Vanderbilt Master of Public Health (MPH) program. He is the Course Director for the School of Medicine PLAN course, an intense 1-month course designed to instruct medical students during the development of a complete research protocol. During the last 10 years, he has had the opportunity to mentor several talented students, postdoctoral fellows and junior faculty. Almost all of them have remained in academia and launched their independent careers. He was elected a Vanderbilt University Chancellor Faculty Fellow in 2017 and into the Vanderbilt Academy for Excellence in Education and Mentorship in 2018. He received the Vanderbilt University John S. Sergent Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2019. He was elected  Fellow of the Infectious Disease Society of America (IDSA) in 2019, and he was elected a Member of the American Society of Clinical Investigation (ASCI) in 2020.