Description of Research Expertise

Dr. Delgado is a tenure track Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine and Epidemiology at the University of Pennsylvania. His research blends behavioral and data sciences with insights gleaned through practicing emergency medicine in an urban trauma center to guide patients and clinicians toward decisions that are personally safer or improve the quality of acute care. Dr. Delgado has a passion for leading multidisciplinary teams to address pressing public health problems. His work has addressed the opioid crisis, Covid-19, trauma and firearm injuries, and distracted and alcohol-impaired driving. These crises are not only among the current leading causes of total life-years lost in America, but the sources of considerable health inequities. His vision is to redesign choice environments to make the safer choice the easier and more attractive choice. To this end he uses a broad set of methodological approaches including implementation science methods for stakeholder engagement, observational comparative effectiveness methods for analyzing hospital encounter data, and pragmatic randomized trials of digital behavioral interventions delivered via electronic health records, automated text messaging, and smartphone apps.

He launched the Behavioral Science & Analytics For Injury Reduction (BeSAFIR) lab, establishing a novel, cross-disciplinary research program in risky behavior prevention, injury epidemiology, and health services research. In 2021, he was appointed as an Associate Director of the Center for Health Incentives and Behavioral Economics (CHIBE), and in 2022, the Director of the Penn Medicine Nudge Unit, the world’s first behavioral design team embedded within a health system. He also serves as Co-Chair of the University Pennsylvania Health System Opioid Task Force and has been appointed to two National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) study committees: one to address alcohol impaired driving and one to address opioid prescribing guidelines.

He has published over 100 peer review publications to date and has been awarded over $16 million in extramural research funding. His achievements have been recognized with the Marjorie A. Bowman New Investigator Research Award and the Academy Health Publication-of-the-Year Award. He received his bachelor’s degree in public policy from Princeton University, his M.D. from Columbia University, College of Physicians and Surgeons, and his M.S. in Health Services Research from Stanford University.