Michael Zdenek David, MS, MD, PhD

Michael David, MD, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Medicine (Infectious Diseases) at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. He is the director of the MRSA [methicillin-resistant S. aureus] Research Program and also the director of the Skin and Soft Tissue Clinic at Penn. Before moving to Penn in 2017, he was a faculty member in the Department of Medicine at the University of Chicago for eight years. He works on the inpatient consultation service and in the outpatient clinic, providing care for patients with a variety of infections.

He has focused his research for more than a decade on the epidemiology of Staphylococcus aureus infections. With the emergence of community-associated MRSA strains in the late 1990s, the epidemiology of MRSA infections in the United States completely changed. In the 1990s, MRSA infections were exclusively found in the health care setting, but by 2005, the majority of MRSA infections had their onset outside of health care facilities. Dr. David’s first NIAID-funded R01 project, named SEMAPHORE, aims to define evolutionary change in S. aureus over 12 months during colonization of the human body in 400 patients with a MRSA skin infection and to assess clinical and microbial risk factors for recurrent S. aureus infections. The findings of SEMAPHORE will be applicable to the prevention of S. aureus infections in the community. In the SPREAD project, funded by a newly awarded R01 grant, he will determine how frequently S. aureus spreads among patients in a tertiary care hospital, what routes of spread are common, how often shared strains cause infections in different patients, and what strain characteristics are associated with hospital spread. He also teaches annually in the Masters of Clinical Epidemiology degree program in the Research Proposal Development Workshop, as well as in the Medical School epidemiology course.