M. Kit Delgado, MD, MS

Biography

Kit Delgado is the director of the Nudge Unit. He is also an associate professor of emergency medicine and epidemiology at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine, an attending physician in the emergency department at Penn Presbyterian Medical Center, an associate director at the Center for Health Incentives and Behavioral Economics, and co-chair of Penn Medicine’s opioid task force.

Kit’s research blends behavioral and data science with insights gleaned from practicing emergency medicine in an urban trauma center to guide patients and clinicians toward decisions that enhance personal safety and improve the quality of acute care. He is passionate about leading multidisciplinary teams to address pressing public health problems. His portfolio includes work to curb the opioid crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic, reduce trauma and firearm injuries, and decrease distracted and alcohol-impaired driving.

Consistent throughout Kit’s work is an effort to redesign choice environments to make the safe choice the easy and more attractive choice. To this end, he uses a broad set of methodological approaches, including implementation science methods for stakeholder engagement, observational comparative effectiveness methods for analyzing hospital encounter data, and pragmatic randomized trials of digital behavioral interventions delivered via electronic health records, automated text messaging, and smartphone apps.

Kit has published over 110 peer-reviewed papers and has been awarded over $15 million in extramural research funding. His achievements have been recognized with the Marjorie A. Bowman New Investigator Research Award and the Academy Health Publication-of-the-Year Award. He received his bachelor’s degree in public policy from Princeton University, his medical degree from the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University, and his master’s degree in health services research from Stanford University.