Press Releases: Georgia
April 3, 2007
Dr. Robert Davis to lead Center for Health Research Southeast at Kaiser Permanente of Georgia
ATLANTA — Robert L. Davis, MD, MPH, has been named director of the Center for Health Research Southeast (CHR/SE), Kaiser Permanente of Georgia. Dr. Davis, a pediatrician with a long career in research and academic medicine, joins Kaiser Permanente from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), where he served as director of the Immunization Safety Office.
"We feel very fortunate to attract someone with Dr. Davis’ skills and experience to lead the Center for Health Research Southeast," says Mary L. Durham, PhD, vice president/research, Kaiser Permanente and director of The Center for Health Research. "We look forward to him building a larger research operation for Kaiser Permanente’s Georgia operations, which will involve us more deeply in the new world of personalized medicine through his own research in pharmacogenomics and expand our local collaboration with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention."
Dr. Davis received his medical degree from the University of California at San Diego and completed his internship and residency in pediatrics at Oregon Health & Sciences University. He then served as an epidemiology intelligence service officer for the CDC at the Washington State Department of Health. Dr. Davis then began his career in academic medicine at the University of Washington, eventually becoming professor of pediatrics and professor of epidemiology in the Schools of Medicine and Public Health. Additionally, Dr. Davis has held positions as an investigator at Group Health Cooperative’s Center for Health Studies (Seattle, WA); adjunct investigator at Kaiser Permanente’s Division of Research (Oakland, CA); senior advisor to the Vaccine Safety Datalink project at the CDC; and associate director of the Vaccine Study Center at Kaiser Permanente Northern California.
"I’m very excited to join Kaiser Permanente to help advance its research agenda," said Dr. Davis. "I’ve worked with many Kaiser Permanente leaders and researchers over the years and have always been impressed by their commitment to finding new ways to improve the health both of their members and the general public. Kaiser Permanente is among a few of the nation’s health plans that have a fully-integrated electronic medical record system which I think is an unparalleled resource for studying diseases and treatments in large populations of people. I am looking forward to conducting research using this very rich database," added Dr. Davis.
The Center for Health Research (TCHR), founded in 1964, is a non-profit research institution dedicated to advancing knowledge to improve health. TCHR has three research sites and all are affiliated with a different region of Kaiser Permanente – CHR/Northwest is affiliated with Kaiser Permanente Northwest; CHR/Hawaii with Kaiser Permanente Hawaii; and CHR/Southeast with Kaiser Permanente Georgia.
Kaiser Permanente is the state of Georgia's largest nonprofit health plan, serving the health care needs of Atlanta metro area residents for 22 years. Kaiser Foundation Health Plan of Georgia, Inc. currently provides comprehensive health care services to approximately 275,000 members through 15 medical facilities in a 28-county service, and a network of affiliated hospitals and physicians. The Health Plan provided more than $5 million in community benefit programs and services.