Robert Gross, M.D.

Robert received his BA in Italian from Cornell University in 1986, his MD from Cornell University Medical College in 1991, and his MSCE from the University of Pennsylvania in 2000. He completed his internship and residency in Internal Medicine and his fellowships in Infectious Diseases and Pharmacoepidemiology at Penn. He joined the faculty ranks as Assistant Professor in 1999, with a promotion to Associate Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology (with tenure) in 2009, and was promoted to his current position of Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology in 2020.

Dr. Gross has been an active member of the Penn CFAR community since its inception, and served as its first Clinical Core Co-Director. He has been instrumental in the establishment and maintenance of the Clinical Core Database and Specimen Repository, a key HIV research resource on campus. Robert’s own research focuses on the continuum of care and prevention in HIV and hepatitis viruses in both the developed and developing worlds in both adults and adolescents. His work has addressed issues of measurement, determinants, and interventions to improve adherence and retention to treatment and prevention. Dr. Gross and his team developed the Managed Problem Solving HIV medication adherence intervention, which has been endorsed as an Evidence Based Intervention by the CDC. In addition to his ongoing research in Botswana, he is also training emerging researchers from there in HIV clinical research principles and practice funded by a training grant from the Fogarty International Center of NIH. Robert is a Senior Scholar in the Center for Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics, and a Senior Fellow in the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics. He is the founding and current Chair of the Adherence Scientific Interest group of the International Society of Pharmacoepidemiology and is an Associate Editor of the society’s journal Pharmacoepidemiology and Drug Safety. He has over 100 peer reviewed publications in journals such as JAMA, Annals of Internal Medicine, JAMA Internal Medicine, and AIDS. His work has been supported by NIH, AHRQ, and industry and he has served on several NIH study sections.