Claire Panosian

Claire Panosian Dunavan, MD is a UCLA professor who attended Stanford, Northwestern Medical School and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and later trained in internal medicine and infectious diseases in Chicago and Boston.

In the 1980s, Panosian was Chief of Infectious Diseases at LA County-Olive View Medical Center. She then moved to UCLA and cared for patients with tropical and infectious diseases while also teaching classes on UCLA’s main campus.

For 30-plus years, Panosian also worked overseas as a professor, policy consultant and/or medical journalist. In 2005, she co-founded UCLA’s Program in Global Health and later served as President of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. Her academic bibliography includes work spanning parasitic infections, malaria, tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS, immunization, and global health policy.

Claire Panosian Dunavan’s second career includes 6 years as a writer and reporter for national programs on Lifetime Television. In 2000, she and her husband Patrick, an 8-time Emmy Award-winning filmmaker, produced a program about hepatitis B that reached 300 million viewers in Asia. In 1999, she created “The Doctor Files” column for the Los Angeles Times. Over the next decade, she often wrote for the LA Times and Scientific American and launched a long-running series of medical mysteries for Discover magazine. Other pieces by Dunavan have appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, Baltimore Sun, New England Journal of Medicine, and American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, among others. Between 2009 and 2013, her “Infection Files” column for Media News Group reached 2 million California readers. She currently writes a column called “Of Parasites and Plagues” for MedPage Today and recently produced a 53-minute documentary about a globalizing, brain-invading foodborne parasite that is now airing and streaming on PBS.