Dr. Mark Ebell is a graduate of the University of Michigan’s Medical School, Family Medicine Residency, and School of Public Health. He is currently a Professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics in the College of Public Health at the University of Georgia. Dr. Ebell is Editor-in-Chief of Essential Evidence and Deputy Editor of the journal American Family Physician. He is author of over 350 peer-reviewed articles and is author or editor of seven books, with a focus on evidence-based practice, systematic reviews, medical informatics, and clinical decision-making. Dr. Ebell served on the US Preventive Services Task Force from 2012 to 2015, and in 2019 was a Fulbright Scholar at RCSI in Dublin, Ireland.
This Teaching/Research award was a collaboration with Professor Tom Fahey at RCSI in Dublin. Dr. Ebell is developing online and in-person teaching modules around evidence-based medicine, clinical decision-making, and cancer screening for use by medical students and other trainees. This award is also supporting continued collaboration around the science of clinical decision rules (CDRs), which are simple scores or algorithms that help improve diagnosis and prognosis. This involves the development a new approach to synthesis of CDR accuracy studies, allowing researchers to determine the overall accuracy of a CDR that has more than 2 possible outcomes such as low, moderate and high-risk groups. This methodology is being applied to decision rules that help inform cancer screening and early diagnosis of cancer in primary care.