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Clinical Professor of Medicine (Emeritus) David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA
Dr. Claire Panosian Dunavan was born in Los Angeles, California and is a 3rd generation Californian of Armenian heritage. Dr. Panosian Dunavan received her education at Stanford University, Northwestern Medical School, Tufts-New England Medical Center, and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. First as Chief of Infectious Diseases at LA County-Olive View Medical Center, then as Director of Travel and Tropical Medicine at UCLA, she has been a UCLA professor, clinician, and teacher since 1984.
As an undergraduate at Stanford, Dr. Panosian Dunavan majored in History and pre-med. Following college, she worked at a rural hospital in Haiti, where she saw children and adults with malnutrition, malaria, TB, injuries, voodoo curses, on most days, one or two died in the waiting room. After this experience, she decided to combine medicine and international health. As a medical student in Chicago, she dreamt about the tropics, but during her internal medicine residency, rotated at the US Public Health Service Hospital for leprosy in Carville, Louisiana, as well as had year off—which she divided between the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and Tripler Army Medical Center in Honolulu. She received training in infectious disease and geographic medicine at Tufts-New England Medical Center. While rotating through different Boston hospitals, she continued to build clinical expertise; in the lab, she focused on a parasitic infection called leishmaniasis and also worked in southern Taiwan. Afterwards, she became an assistant professor at UCLA School of Medicine and Chief of Infectious Diseases at the smallest of the four Los Angeles county hospitals. Thanks to their international patient population, she also saw textbook cases of nearly every exotic diagnosis ever found on an infectious diseases board exam. She worked overseas in the Philippines and Pakistan before becoming medical editor at Lifetime Medical Television, followed by senior medical editor—and soon after, reporter and co-anchor–for “Physician’s Journal,” Lifetime’s weekly, national medical news and interview show as well as a card-carrying member of the Writers Guild of America. She has documented the public health impact of war, disaster and political change in former Soviet Armenia and covered tropical medicine stories. She was recruited back to UCLA’s Westwood campus as an infectious diseases specialist and Director of Travel and Tropical Medicine, where she has chaired UCLA’s campus-wide Pacific Rim Research Program, co-founded UCLA’s Program in Global Health, and—for the last 10-plus years– taught global health to undergraduates majoring in International Development. Dr. Panosian Dunavan currently serves as UCLA’s campus representative to UC’s new, system-wide Global Health Institute. In 2008, she also served as the President of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene.
Once back at UCLA, Dr. Panosian Dunavan continued to work overseas as a journalist and medical educator—especially in Asia, largely switching from broadcast to print journalism in the late 1990s when she launched a monthly column called the “The Doctor Files” in the Los Angeles Times and started to write for Discover magazine and Scientific American, where she has written on real-life stories about Chagas Disease, tetanus, cholera, schistosomiasis, leishmaniasis, African sleeping sickness, measles, malaria, rabies, strongyloides, and filariasis—all based on patients she has personally seen and cared for. In 1997, her interview with a dying physician won an international “Freddie” Award. In 2000, with her husband Patrick Dunavan—an 8-time Emmy Award-winning documentary filmmaker —she produced a television program on hepatitis B which has reached 300 million international viewers. In recent years, she has written regularly for national newspapers and magazines. She currently writes a weekly column called “The Infection Files” which runs in California newspapers. Her journalism spans issues in infectious diseases and public health affecting everyone on the planet to global health policy and economics. In 2005, she also wrote a landmark article on malaria for Scientific American. Now, in addition to pieces in the Los Angeles Times, she publishes columns and op-eds in the New York Times, Washington Post and Baltimore Sun. She also writes occasional narrative essays for the New England Journal of Medicine, Health Affairs, JAMA and other professional journals. Dr. Panosian Duanvan also serves as a consultant for the National Academies of Science/Institute of Medicine.