Catherine Sarkisian, MD

Catherine Sarkisian, MD, MSHS, is a professor at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA Division of General Internal Medicine & Health Services Research and a staff physician at the Greater Los Angeles VA Healthcare System. Since early in her training, she has committed her research career to improving quality of life among vulnerable older adults. Most of her work has focused on implementing and evaluating academic-community partnered interventions and more recently, academic-health-system partnered pragmatic trials. Over the past several years, her research has focused on reducing low-value care; she is principal investigator on an NIA/NIH R01 study to evaluate the use of behavioral economic “nudges” in the electronic health record to reduce unnecessary pre-operative testing before cataract surgeries. Dr. Sarkisian serves as the director of the NIH/NIA-funded Resource Center for Minority Aging Research/Center for Healthcare Improvement of Minority Elders (RCMAR/CHIME) Community Liaison Core, co-leader of the UCLA CTSI Special Populations Program and Co-Director of the Stakeholder Engagement Core of the U.S Deprescribing Research Network (USDeN). She received her AB degree (with honors) in philosophy from Princeton University, her M.D. from the University of California, San Francisco and an MSHS in Health Services from the UCLA School of Public Health.