VPCAT Program Personnel

Michael A. Rubin, MD, PhD, MS

Title: Director, VPCAT Research Scholars Program | Professor and Vice Chair, Faculty Affairs & Development, Department of Internal Medicine

Email: michael.rubin@hsc.utah.edu 

I began participating in the VPCAT Research Scholars Program in 2014, providing mentorship to seven exceptional junior faculty. In late 2016, I succeed Dr. Carrie Byington as the Director. I am pleased to be able to lead this unique program, a program that serves as one of the University’s flagship, junior faculty mentoring programs.

By way of introduction, I am a Tenured Professor of Medicine with a nationally recognized research program around antibiotic resistance and infection prevention, with several key leadership roles in research and administration at both the University of Utah and the VA Salt Lake City Health Care System. In 1997, I graduated from the University of Illinois at Chicago as part of the combined MD/PhD program with a doctorate in microbiology and immunology. I completed my internal medicine residency and a fellowship in infectious diseases at the University of Utah. In 2003, I joined the faculty in the Division of Epidemiology and the VA staff in 2009.

I am recognized as an innovator and leader in faculty development at the University and the VA. At the VA, I lead the IDEAS Mentoring and Career Development Program, which oversees the mentoring of early-career VA investigators and supports the submission of VA career development awards. I relish and excel in mentoring others to ensure their success, which has led to several additional leadership roles across the University. I am Vice Chair for Faculty Development for the Department of Internal Medicine, facilitating the success of approximately 400 faculty members in areas including faculty advancement, mentoring, leadership development, and career satisfaction.

Further, I am an experienced investigator with a history of extramural funding and expertise in health services research and implementation science encompassing the domains of medical informatics, decision-support systems, and computer simulation modeling, particularly as these relate to topics in infectious diseases, antibiotic resistance, and infection control surveillance. My research focuses on preventable healthcare-associated infections (HAI) and infections with multidrug-resistant organisms (MDRO), including Clostridioides difficile and methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. I am a national leader in antimicrobial stewardship, simulation modeling, and population health tool development for electronic health records. Relevant recent and ongoing projects include longitudinal epidemiologic analyses of MDRO infection rates, hospital-based interventions to reduce device-associated infections and antimicrobial prescribing, and the development of state-of-the-art computer simulation models to test novel HAI intervention strategies and to analyze their clinical and economic impacts. I have been instrumental in advancing national priorities for infection prevention and surveillance using advanced informatics methods and tools.