Rulin Hechter MD, PhD, MS

Dr. Rulin Hechter is an infectious disease epidemiologist in the Department of Research & Evaluation and an adjunct assistant professor of Epidemiology at the University of California, Los Angeles. 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 patients affected by other chronic comorbidities, including HIV/AIDS. Her other research interests include vaccine safety and effectiveness, and the disparity of and barriers to vaccine uptake. She has considerable experience leading and collaborating on multisite studies. She is also an Assistant Professor of Health Systems Science at the Kaiser Permanente Bernard J. Tyson School of Medicine.

Dr. Hechter has worked on much large government- and industry-sponsored epidemiologic and intervention studies. She has extensive experience using automated healthcare data for research. This includes her role as site principal investigator of the Health Systems Node of the Clinical Trials Network funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and as a site of several grants to improve PrEP (pre-exposure prophylaxis) screening in primary care, enhance patient engagement in addiction treatment, and study opioid use outcomes.