Dr. Ana M. Palacio Joins the Division of Epidemiology and Population Health Sciences

Ana M. Palacio, M.D., M.P.H., a cardiovascular risk reduction and health inequities expert with the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, has joined the Department of Public Health Sciences as Professor of Clinical.

“We are most pleased that Dr. Palacio has joined our department given her interdisciplinary work developing personalized approaches to reducing health disparities and her long-standing support of our teaching mission in the department and across the medical school,” said David J. Lee, Ph.D., interim chair and professor in the Miller School of Medicine’s Department of Public Health Sciences.

“I am very enthusiastic about working with my colleagues in the department in strengthening the bridge between clinical medicine and public health. Multidisciplinary approaches are pivotal to make any progress in the reduction of health and healthcare disparities,” said Dr. Palacio.

Before joining as faculty in the Miller School of Medicine in 2004, Dr. Palacio completed the University of Miami and Jackson Memorial Medical Center’s Post Graduate Residency Program in internal medicine, as well as Johns Hopkins University’s Post Graduate Fellowship in General Internal Medicine.

Since then, Dr. Palacio’s work has focused on the improvement of clinical outcomes among high-risk adults through the implementation of innovative ancillary strategies, such as the use of administrative data to identify those at risk, remote health coaching, point of care medication delivery, the collection and use of social determinants of health for risk stratification and prevention and the integration of multilevel data.

She is a local site principal investigator for the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs’ Million Veteran Program—a national research program to learn how genes, lifestyle, and military exposures affect health and illness.

Dr. Palacio is also a local site principal investigator for the Investigation of Metformin in Pre-Diabetes on Atherosclerotic Cardiovascular Outcomes (VA-IMPACT) program.VA-IMPACT, also housed within the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs, is a multicenter, prospective, randomized, double blind, secondary prevention trial to test if treatment with metformin, compared with placebo, reduces mortality and cardiovascular morbidity in patients with pre-diabetes and established atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease.

Additionally, she is a member of the Miami VA Geriatric Research, Clinical and Education Center, co-investigator in the U54 Precision Medicine and Health Disparities Collaborative, as well as the director of the University of Miami Program in Research Education—a program that trains junior faculty in conducting clinical research.

Written by Amanda Torres

Published on November 3, 2020