معرفی
Per H. Gesteland, MD, MSc, serves as an Associate Professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Pediatric Hospital Medicine and Adjunct Associate Professor in Biomedical Informatics at the University of Utah. He practices as an academic Hospitalist at Intermountain Healthcare's Primary Children's Hospital with 16+ years of pediatric hospital medicine experience and 20 years in urgent care settings, managing patients from routine febrile infants to complex post-surgical cases.
His educational background includes:
- B.S. in Biology and Chemistry from Allegheny College
- M.D. from University of Utah School of Medicine (1996)
- Combined Internal Medicine/Pediatrics Residency at University of Minnesota (2000)
- M.S. in Medical Informatics and NLM Fellowship at University of Utah (2002)
Dr. Gesteland's research revolutionizes infectious disease surveillance through health informatics, focusing on clinical information systems, natural language processing, machine learning, and biosurveillance. His GermWatch program—born from Olympic outbreak detection systems—provides real-time situational awareness for Utah's public health infrastructure. Current work advances probabilistic methods for disease forecasting and response interoperability, bridging clinical practice with population health.
His 40+ publications reveal consistent innovation in translating informatics to frontline care, particularly in pediatric infectious disease detection and antibiotic stewardship. Recent work integrates NLP with Bayesian modeling for cross-institutional outbreak detection, while foundational research established Olympic-scale surveillance frameworks still in use today.
As Principal or Co-Investigator, he has secured funding from CDC, NLM, AHRQ, TATRC, and University of Utah translational science programs. His GermWatch initiative exemplifies successful academic-public health collaboration, transforming Utah's epidemic response capabilities through clinician-friendly data visualization tools like the EpiCanvas infectious disease weather map.
