Description of CCEB Expertise

Brian L. Strom, M.D., M.P.H. is Executive Vice Dean for Institutional Affairs, Perelman School of Medicine (PSOM) at the University of Pennsylvania. He is also George S. Pepper Professor of Public Health and Preventive Medicine, Professor of Biostatistics & Epidemiology, Professor of Medicine, and Professor of Pharmacology. He was Founding Director of the Center for Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics (CCEB), Founding Chair of the Department of Biostatistics and Epidemiology, and Founding Director of the Graduate Group in Epidemiology & Biostatistics.

Dr. Strom earned a B.S. in Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry from Yale University in 1971, and then an M.D. from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in 1975. From 1975-1978 he was an intern and resident in Internal Medicine and from 1978-1980 he was an NIH fellow in Clinical Pharmacology at the University of California, San Francisco. He simultaneously earned an M.P.H. in Epidemiology at the University of California, Berkeley. He has been on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine since 1980. The CCEB that he created at Penn includes over 550 faculty, research and support staff, and trainees. CCEB research currently receives nearly $49 million/year in extramural support. Its total budget is approximately $67 million.

Dr. Strom is a nationally recognized leader in clinical research training. He was previously elected President of the Association of Clinical Research Training and currently is principal investigator (PI) or co-PI for eight National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded clinical research training programs. More than 560 clinicians have been trained or are in training through the CCEB’s Master of Science in Clinical Epidemiology degree program, which Dr. Strom helped develop in the late 1970s and early 1980s and which he led for many years. All but about 55 MSCE trainees have appointments in academic or other research institutions. Dr. Strom received the 2004 Christian R. and Mary F. Lindback Award, Penn’s most prestigious teaching award, in recognition of the contribution he has made in his career to clinical research training.

Dr. Strom's interests span many areas of clinical epidemiology, but his major research interest is the field of pharmacoepi-demiology, i.e., the application of epidemiologic methods to the study of drug use and effects. He is editor of the field's major text (now in its fifth edition), and is Editor-in-Chief for Pharmacoepidemiology and Drug Safety, the official journal of the International Society for Pharmacoepidemiology (ISPE). He is best known as a founder of the field of pharmacoepi-demiology, and a pioneer in using large automated databases for research. As one of many specific contributions, his research was pivotal in getting the American Heart Association and American Dental Association to reverse 50 years of guidelines, and recommend against use of antibiotics to prevent infective endocarditis, instead of recommending for this widespread practice. In addition to writing more than 560 papers, he has been PI for more than 260 grants, including over $95 million in direct costs alone. Dr. Strom has also made substantial contributions to many additional extramurally-funded grants. Recent grants include a National Cancer Institute Program Project Grant on Molecular Susceptibility to Hormone-Induced Cancers, awards from the Agency for Health Care Research and Quality for a Center for Research and Education on Therapeutics, a Center of Excellence for Patient Safety Research and Practice, and a center within the Developing Evidence to Inform Decisions About Effectiveness (DEcIDE) Network. He has been invited to more than 395 talks outside his local area, including being the keynote speaker for numerous international meetings. Dr. Strom has been a consultant to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), NIH, Centers for Disease Control, United States Pharmacopoeia (USP), Association of American Medical Colleges, Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations, foreign governments, most major pharmaceutical manufacturers, and many law firms.

Dr. Strom was a member of the Board of Regents of the American College of Physicians (ACP), and the Boards of Directors of the American Society for Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics (ASCPT), the American College of Epidemiology, and the Association for Patient-Oriented Research. He was previously President of ISPE. Dr. Strom was on the Drug Utilization Review Committee and the Gerontology Committee of the USP and is currently the representative from the ACP to the USP. He served on the Drug Safety and Risk Management Advisory Committee for the FDA. Dr. Strom was Chair of the Institute of Medicine’s (IOM) Committee to Assess the Safety and Efficacy of the Anthrax Vaccine, Chair of the IOM Committee on Smallpox Vaccine Program Implementation, and was a member of the IOM Committee to Review the CDC Anthrax Vaccine Safety and Efficacy Research Program. He recently chaired the IOM Committee to Review the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health’s Traumatic Injury Program and was a member of the IOM Committee on Standards for Developing Trustworthy Clinical Practice Guidelines. He currently serves on the National Research Council Report Review Committee.

Dr. Strom is a member of the American Epidemiology Society, and is one of a handful of clinical epidemiologists ever elected to the American Society of Clinical Investigation and American Association of Physicians. He has also been an elected member of the IOM of the National Academy of Sciences since 2001. Dr. Strom received the 2003 Rawls-Palmer Progress in Medicine Award from the ASCPT, the Naomi M. Kanof Clinical Investigator Award of the Society for Investigative Dermatology, the George S. Pepper Professorship of Public Health and Preventive Medicine, and in 2006 he received the Sustained Scientific Excellence Award from the ISPE. In addition, Dr. Strom was named the 2008 recipient of the John Phillips Memorial Award for Outstanding Work in Clinical Medicine. This award is from the ACP and is considered to be one of the highest awards in Internal Medicine. Penn awards that Dr. Strom has received include the Class of 1992 Class Teaching Award and the Samuel Martin Health Evaluation Sciences Research Award.

Description of Content-based Expertise

Cancer Epidemiology, Cardiovascular Epidemiology, Clinical Pharmacology, General Internal Medicine, Infectious Diseases, Pharmacoepidemiology