Russell L. Rothman, MD, MPP

Dr. Rothman's current research focuses on improving care for adult and pediatric patients with diabetes, obesity and other chronic diseases. He has been funded by the NIH, American Diabetes Association, and other sources to examine the role of literacy and numeracy in patients with diabetes and obesity. He has been the Principal Investigator on over $35 million in extramural funding and has authored over 100 manuscripts. He is currently the Principal Investigator on several NIH funded studies addressing literacy and health communication in obesity prevention and diabetes. 

He is also the Principal Investigator of the PCORI funded Mid-South Clinical Data Research Network which engages over 50 hospitals and 1,000’s of ambulatory practices reaching patients across the nation. He is also PI of the new CMS funded Mid-South Practice Transformation Network which is engaging 4,000 clinicians in quality improvement. Dr. Rothman currently serves on the PCORI Health Disparities Advisory Board. Dr. Rothman also serves on the PCORI PCORnet Executive Steering Committee with is overseeing the development of a national network to support comparative effectiveness research and pragmatic clinical trials, with over $250 million dollars committed from PCORI to date.

Dr. Rothman serves as the Co-Chair of the Steering Committee of the ADAPTABLE study, a $14 million dollar pragmatic clinical trial enrolling 20,000 patients to evaluate the optimal dose of aspirin in secondary prevention.

He is also on the Board of Directors as Vice President for Research for the American Academy on Communication in Healthcare, and is the Chair of the 2015 International Conference for Communication in Healthcare. Rothman has served as a reviewer on multiple NIH study sections, including the NIH Special Emphasis Panel on Health Literacy and has been a Pfizer Visiting Professor in Health Literacy at several academic institutions.

As Director of the Vanderbilt Center for Health Services Research, Dr. Rothman oversees a Center that engages over 140 faculty across the University engaged in over $50 million annual dollars of funded research related to health services research, implementation science, behavioral research, health disparities research, quality improvement research and other areas aimed at improving health outcomes.