Robert M. Palmer MD

Dr. Robert Palmer took a somewhat circuitous route to the directorship of the Glennan Center for Geriatrics and Gerontology. He says he was born to be a doctor, but didn’t realize until he was in medical school that he was destined to become an internist – and it wasn’t until 10 years after his residency that he went into geriatric medicine. The two compelling passions that have inspired him throughout a nationally distinguished career have been internal medicine – It offers the combination of taking care of patients and focusing on the mechanisms and treatment of disease, he says and working to improve the way healthcare is delivered, on both a small and grand scale.

He received his medical degree from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and as his interest in public health continued to grow, he earned a master of public health at the University of California at Los Angeles. He calls those years transformative. He worked for the LA County Department of Health Services in Pico Rivera, a primarily Mexican-American community, where with funding from the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, he was principal investigator and director of a program to create hypertension screening, detection and treatment in the community. That program, he says, has been the template for everything he’s done throughout his career.