Brad Spellberg, MD, has been appointed chief medical officer of the LAC+USC Medical Center and as professor of medicine and associate dean for clinical affairs at the Keck School of Medicine of USC.

Spellberg joins the Keck School of Medicine of USC from the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, where he was professor of medicine at the Harbor-UCLA Medical Center and associate medical director for inpatient services and associate program director for the internal medicine residency training program.

An infectious disease specialist, Spellberg and his laboratory conduct research on drug-resistant infections in an effort to develop vaccines and immune therapies to prevent and treat them. He has published more than 100 peer-reviewed papers in the areas of infectious diseases and antimicrobial therapy.

Spellberg has served as chair of the gram negative committee and as a steering committee member of the Antibiotic Resistance Leadership Group, an organization dedicated to prioritizing, designing and executing clinical research to reduce the public health threat of antibacterial resistance. He is also author of Rising Plague: The Global Threat from Deadly Bacteria and Our Dwindling Arsenal to Fight Them, which he wrote to inform and educate the public about the crisis in antibiotic resistant infections and lack of antibiotic development.

While at Harbor-UCLA, Spellberg spearheaded numerous successful quality and operational improvement initiatives. He also serves as the Department of Health Services physician champion for ICD-10 implementation (ICD-10 is the 10th revision of the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems, a medical classification list by the World Health Organization. It codes for diseases, signs and symptoms, abnormal findings, complaints, social circumstances, and external causes of injury or diseases.), which will be of increasing importance during the coming year.

Spellberg earned a bachelor’s degree in molecular cell biology-immunology at the University of California, Berkeley. He earned his medical degree from the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and completed his residency in internal medicine, with a subspecialty fellowship in infectious diseases, at Harbor-UCLA.

— By Hope Hamashige