Dr. Talan received his medical degree from the University of Illinois in Chicago, near where he grew up. He later came to UCLA and completed his residencies in Internal and Emergency Medicine (EM) and a fellowship in Infectious Diseases (ID). He was the first physician to be residency- and fellowship-trained and board-certified in Internal Medicine, EM, and ID. From 1993 to 2014, Dr. Talan was Chief of the Olive View-UCLA Department of Emergency Medicine. He is currently faculty at the UCLA Ronald Reagan Department of Emergency Medicine. He also worked for 10 years at a rural single-coverage critical access ED in the Santa Ynez Valley near Santa Barbara, where he and his wife currently reside.
Throughout his career, Dr. Talan has advanced patient care at the intersection of EM and ID by utilizing EDs to improve surveillance and conduct clinical research of novel diagnostic and therapeutic approaches. He has directed many multi-center ED-based surveillance projects and RCTs. In 1995, he established EMERGEncy ID NET, an ED-based sentinel network for research of emerging infections in the US funded by CDC. This collaborative network of emergency and public health researchers has been funded for over 30 years and has made many important observations, including the seminal report on the emergence of community-associated methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus - MRSA (N Engl J Med 2006).
Dr. Talan has led multi-center ED-based RCTs including trials demonstrating the efficacy of short-course antibiotic treatment of acute pyelonephritis (JAMA 2000), adjunctive antibiotics for surgically drained skin abscesses (N Engl J Med 2016), empiric treatment of cellulitis without MRSA coverage (JAMA 2017), and nonoperative treatment of appendicitis (N Engl J Med 2020). Recently, he directed a multi-center ED surveillance project that determined the attributable risk of ED healthcare personnel contracting COVID-19 through providing direct patient care during 2020 (PLoS One 2022) and contributed to one of the first post-pharma COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness studies (N Engl J Med 2021). His current research focuses on the projected impact of point-of-care synovial fluid testing for the evaluation of septic arthritis and the development of an anti-staphylococcal vaccine.
