Rulin Hechter, MD, PhD, MS

Dr. Rulin Hechter is an infectious disease epidemiologist in the Department of Research & Evaluation and an adjunct associate professor of Epidemiology at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is also an Assistant Professor of Health Systems Science in the Kaiser Permanente Bernard J. Tyson School of Medicine. Her research focuses on the prevention and treatment of HIV and other sexually transmitted infections. She also studies the impact of psychiatric disorders and substance abuse on health outcomes and care engagement among people with HIV. Her other research interests include vaccine safety and effectiveness and disparity of and barriers to vaccine uptake. She has considerable experience leading and collaborating on multisite studies using automated health care data.

Dr. Hechter has worked on many large government- and industry-sponsored epidemiologic and intervention studies. She serves as site principal investigator of the Health Systems Node of the Clinical Trials Network

funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and has received several grants to improve PrEP (pre-exposure prophylaxis) screening in primary care, enhance patient engagement in addiction treatment, and study opioid use outcomes.