Julia Szymczak, PhD

Julia E. Szymczak, PhD is now affiliated with the University of Utah and remains affiliated through ARES through the Division of Infectious Diseases. Dr. Szymczak was most recently an Assistant Professor of Epidemiology in the Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Informatics at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine, a position she has held from July 2016 through January 2023. Dr. Szymczak completed her BA in sociology at Brandeis University and a PhD in sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, where she specialized in medical sociology, organizational theory, sociology of the professions and ethnographic methods. Dr. Szymczak’s independent research is multidisciplinary and sits at the intersection of healthcare delivery science, patient safety, quality improvement, and implementation science. She seeks to advance healthcare delivery and quality improvement science by (1) generating knowledge about the social mechanisms that produce safe, high quality, and equitable healthcare and (2) applying that knowledge to the design and implementation of sustainable interventions that measurably improves patient outcomes and minimizes unintended consequences. Dr. Szymczak has spent the past 5 years building an extramurally funded, independent research agenda focused on healthcare delivery challenges related to infectious diseases, including hospital acquired infections and antimicrobial overuse. She is a nationally recognized expert on the sociobehavioral determinants of antimicrobial use across diverse settings, including primary care, critical care, hospital medicine, pediatrics, palliative care, and veterinary medicine. In addition to publishing widely on this topic and delivering over 50 invited lectures nationwide, she has served in expert advisory roles for the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America (SHEA), Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA), the Pew Charitable Trust, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Presidential Advisory Council on Combating Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria (PACCARB).  Her current research on antimicrobials, funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), has focused on identifying sociobehavioral drivers of overprescribing and the factors that shape the success of antimicrobial stewardship interventions. The next phase of her research agenda involves the design, testing and implementation of novel approaches to stewardship. She is currently a Co-Investigator with substantial responsibility for the design and evaluation of two large, hybrid implementation-effectiveness antimicrobial stewardship studies funded by the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) and AHRQ.