Dr. Michael Pignone is a professor and the inaugural Chair of the Department of Internal Medicine and holds the Dr. Lowell Henry Lebermann Endowed Chair in Internal Medicine. He also serves as Co-Director of the program on Cancer Prevention and Control at the Livestrong Cancer Institutes and is a courtesy professor in the Departments of Oncology and Population Health. Before joining Dell Medical School, Dr. Pignone was a professor of medicine, Chief of the Division of General Internal Medicine, and Director of the Institute for Healthcare Quality Improvement at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He received his medical degree in 1993 and completed residency training in primary care internal medicine in 1996, both at the University of California, San Francisco. He then completed fellowship training in 1996-98 through the Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program, including a master’s degree in epidemiology from the UNC School of Public Health.
Dr. Pignone’s research is focused on chronic disease screening, prevention and treatment, and on improving medical decision making and health equity. His main areas of interest include cancer screening and prevention, particularly colorectal cancer screening. He has developed and tested novel interventions, including decision aids, to mitigate literacy-related health disparities and to improve the use of appropriate preventive services. He has published more than 300 peer-reviewed journal articles.
From 2013-2016, he served as a member of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force and has served on a number of national guideline and quality improvement panels, including work for the American Diabetes Association, the American Heart Association, and the National Committee on Quality Assurance in Healthcare. In addition, he has served as an associate editor for Medical Decision Making and as an editorial board member for JAMA Internal Medicine, and publications committee member for the American College of Physicians. Dr. Pignone is a member of the Society of General Internal Medicine and the Society for Medical Decision Making, and he is a Master of the American College of Physicians and Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians.