Professor
University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center
Disclosure: I do not have any relevant financial / non-financial relationships with any proprietary interests.
Trish M. Perl, MD, MSc, FIDSA, FSHEA, currently serves as the Jay P. Sanford Professor of Medicine and the Chief of Infectious Diseases at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School and Medical Center (UTSW). Dr. Perl received her Bachelor of Arts and medical degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a Master of Science degree from McGill University in Montreal, Canada. She completed a residency in internal medicine at McGill University and a fellowship in infectious diseases and clinical epidemiology at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, Iowa.
Prior to coming to UTSW, she rose through the ranks at Johns Hopkins University and Health System to become a Professor of Medicine and Pathology in the School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland, and in the Department of Epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. As the Hospital Epidemiologist of the Johns Hopkins Hospital between 1996 and 2011, she built the Infection Prevention and Hospital Epidemiology’s reputation as a leader and innovator in the field. She became the Senior Epidemiologist for The Johns Hopkins Health System and the University and again was instrumental in implementing important institutional policies that impacted the hospitals, university and affiliates. She is a clinician and enjoys seeing patients and has extensive practical and research experience in the field of healthcare associated infections and resistant and epidemiologically significant organisms and is recognized globally for her innovation and research in the field and the use of research knowledge in the healthcare setting. Dr. Perl is a former President of the Society of Hospital Epidemiologists of America (SHEA) and has served on advisory panels for the IOM, the CDC and WHO and been a consultant to the NIH and ARHQ. She was the Courage Fund Visiting Professor in 2008-10 at the National University of Singapore. An active researcher, Dr. Perl has been a principal and co-principal investigator on multiple studies funded by the CDC, the Veteran’s Affairs Administration and BARDA over the years. She has authored or coauthored over 300 peer-reviewed articles. In addition, she has written multiple chapters and contributed to guidelines and policies relevant to healthcare associated infections at the institutional, state and federal level. She has been asked to help with management of international outbreaks including SARS and MERS CoV and consults with international governments on guideline development and strategies to prevent healthcare associated infections and antimicrobial resistance.
Dr. Perl’s presentation, titled Coronavirus and Viral Pneumonias: A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing" will focus on the emerging data on viral pneumonias with a particular focus on coronovirus infections from SARS to SARS CoV-2.
