Lawrence Purpura MD, MPH, TM

Lawrence James Purpura, MD, MPHTM, MS is an Assistant Professor of Infectious Diseases at the Columbia University Irving Medical Center. His research interests involve applied epidemiology and outbreak response. Prior to infectious diseases fellowship, he was an Epidemic Intelligence Service Officer at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where he responded to the 2014-2016 West African Ebola outbreak, the 2016 Rift Valley fever outbreak in Uganda, and the 2015-2016 multi-state Seoul virus outbreak in the United States. During his fellowship training at Columbia, he was an ICAP Global HIV Implementation Science fellow and worked on a city-wide home HIV self-testing program with the NYC DOHMH, studied the prevalence of GI pathogens in a cohort of patients taking PrEP, and implemented an intervention to improve HIV and STI screening at Columbia University Medical Center.

Since COVID-19, he has been involved with several COVID-19-related research activities, including the establishment of a longitudinal cohort study and acting as a co-investigator in COVID-19 vaccine and treatment trials. His clinical and research focus has been on patients suffering from Post-Acute Sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 Infection (PASC) or Long COVID and he has been involved in projects that aim to elucidate SARS-CoV-2 viral persistence, immunity, and clinical sequelae in convalescent patients. He has K23 funding to evaluate the epidemiology and determinants of neurologic Post-acute Sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 which brings innovative approaches to this area of investigation.