Jeff Curtis MD, PhD
Dr. Jeffrey Curtis is a Professor of Medicine in the Division of Clinical Immunology and Rheumatology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB). Dr. Curtis received a Medical Degree (MD) and a Master of Public Health (MPH) degree from Oregon Health & Sciences University in Portland, OR. He subsequently completed a residency in internal medicine at Oregon Health & Science University and a fellowship in rheumatology at UAB. He completed a graduate program in Clinical Informatics at Stanford University and received his Master of Science (MS) degree in epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health. He is board certified in both rheumatology and clinical informatics.
Dr. Curtis holds the Harbert-Ball Endowed Professorship in Rheumatology and Immunology at UAB. His major research emphasis is on evaluating the safety and comparative effectiveness of medications for rheumatic diseases. He also conducts both investigator-initiated and industry-sponsored clinical trials in rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and psoriatic arthritis (PsA), including large pragmatic trials. He is the Co-Director of the UAB Pharmacoepidemiology and Pharmacoeconomics Research (PEER) Unit. PEER uses multiple large and linked data sources to study comparative effectiveness questions across multiple chronic diseases. The data sources he routinely uses include national electronic health record, health plan claims (e.g. Medicare, commercial insurance), traditional registry, patient reported outcomes, mobile device, wearable technology; he has done numerous projects that link these disparate data sources together. In 2012, he was awarded the Henry Kunkel Young Investigator Award by the American College of Rheumatology (ACR) and was accepted into the American Society for Clinical Investigation (ASCI) in 2016. In 2015, Dr. Curtis was appointed as a member to the FDA Arthritis Advisory Committee, and also the CDC’s ACIP Herpes Zoster Working Group.
The evaluation of the efficacy, comparative effectiveness, and safety of the medications, devices, and other interventions (e.g. vaccines) used in the care of rheumatoid arthritis, psoriatic arthritis, and spondyloarthritis patients. He served on the Core Expert Panel for the ACR’s 2008, 2012, and 2015 Recommendations for the Use of Nonbiologic and Biologic Disease Modifying Antirheumatic Drugs in RA. He was the Deputy Director for a collaborative project between the FDA, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), and a number of academic centers studying the safety of biologic agents using multiple, pooled national data sources. He has served as the co-PI of the UAB Coordinating Center of the American College of Rheumatology’s (ACR) electronic health record-based registry Rheumatology Informatics System for Effectiveness (RISE) registry. RISE aggregates and normalizes EHR data from more than 3 million rheumatology patients, with data contributed by more than 1,000 rheumatology providers. He is the Co-PI of the mobile health-based, PCORI-funded Patient Powered Research Network “ArthritisPower” research registry, focused on RA, psoriasis, psoriatic arthritis, and Spondyloarthritis that has enrolled more than 30,000 patients.
Dr. Curtis also studies risk factors for and outcomes of osteoporosis. He was a member of the ACR’s task force to update recommendations for the management of glucocorticoid induced osteoporosis (GIOP). He served on the ASBMR Task Force on Atypical Subtrochanteric and Diaphyseal Fractures. In 2020, he was asked to serve on the ACR’s Vaccine Guideline Task Force, and he also leads the separate ACR COVID Vaccine Guidance Task Force.
Dr. Curtis is a member of the American College of Rheumatology (ACR), the International Society for Pharmacoepidemiology (ISPE), the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA), and the American Society of Bone and Mineral Research (ASBMR). He has been on the editorial board for Arthritis & Rheumatism, Pharmacoepidemiology and Drug Safety (PDS) and Arthritis Care and Research (AC&R). According to Google Scholar, he has an H-index of 81, and an i-10 index of 381, based on his authorship of more than 550 peer-reviewed manuscripts, review articles and book chapters.