Executive Leadership & Expert Bios

Cliff McDonald, MD

Chief, Prevention and Response Branch, Division of Healthcare Quality Promotion, NCPDCID

 

Cliff McDonald, MD, is a former officer in the Epidemic Intelligence Service and is currently the Chief of the Prevention and Response Branch in the Division of Healthcare Quality Promotion at the CDC. This division seeks to protect patients and healthcare personnel and promotes safety and quality in healthcare delivery systems. Examples of activities include programs for addressing antimicrobial resistance, healthcare-associated infections, and other adverse events affecting patients and healthcare workers. Dr. McDonald is an expert in Clostridium difficile, an antibiotic resistant bacterium.

Dr. McDonald graduated from Northwestern University Medical School in Chicago. He completed his Internal Medicine Residency at Michigan State and an Infectious Diseases Fellowship at the University of South Alabama, following which he completed a fellowship in Medical Microbiology at Duke University. Past positions have included Associate Investigator at the National Health Research Institutes in Taiwan, where he helped develop an island-wide surveillance system for antimicrobial resistance, and Assistant Professor in the Division of Infectious Diseases at the University of Louisville, where he worked as a hospital epidemiologist in infection control. He is the author or co-author of over 75 peer-reviewed publications, is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians and the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America, and a member of the Infectious Diseases Society of America and American Society for Microbiology.

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