Loria Pollack, MD, MPH

Lori A. “Loria” Pollack, MD, MPH, is the Medical Director for CDC’s National Program of Cancer Registries in the Division of Cancer Prevention and Control (DCPC). Dr. Pollack focuses on innovative approaches to cancer data collection and analyses in multi-state registry projects. Her work contributes to the availability of high-quality U.S. Cancer Statistics through on-demand data visualizations for the public and data sets for researchers. She serves as CDC liaison to the American Joint Committee on Cancer and works with other national organizations to develop cancer surveillance standards, including co-chairing a workgroup to align U.S. cancer coding with World Health Organization tumor terminology.

Dr. Pollack joined CDC in 2002 as a U.S. Public Health Service officer in the Epidemic Intelligence Service after receiving degrees in medicine and public health from Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. She completed Columbia University’s internal medicine residency in Cooperstown, New York, a second preventive medicine residency, and is board-certified in both specialties.

Her career includes remarkably diverse experience in chronic disease, infectious disease, and local public health. Dr. Pollack served from 2002 to 2012 in DCPC’s Epidemiology and Applied Research Branch, primarily characterizing the issue of cancer survivorship and leading national efforts related to quality of life and care after cancer treatment. In 2012, she was assigned to the Medical Director of the local health department in Atlanta, Georgia, where she was instrumental in designing a new HIV prevention program that included outreach to the most at-risk population, including linkage to treatment. She also spent three years (2013 to 2015) in CDC’s Division of Healthcare Quality Promotion, focused on preventing health care-associated illness and addressing antibiotic resistance. Dr. Pollack led a collaboration with the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control to develop antibiotic stewardship program indicators included in CDC’s National Health Safety Network annual hospital survey.

Dr. Pollack has published more than 80 peer-reviewed papers and government reports in epidemiology, health service research, and quality improvement. She has served on many of CDC’s public health emergency responses, including on the clinical care and immunization safety teams and at an airport quarantine station during the COVID-19 pandemic. She also led the e-Cigarette, or Vaping, Product Use-Associated Lung Injury epidemiology team, collected data on fungal meningitis from contaminated injections, and assessed hospital preparedness on the domestic Ebola response. A driving theme in Dr. Pollack’s career is the translation and dissemination of research into practical guidance and tools to improve health and health care.

Dr. Pollack shares her perspective on the use of data to inform public health in the blog post, Data on the Forefront: How CDC Keeps Measuring Progress and Targeting Action. She talks about the importance of cancer registry data to understanding how cancer affects the United States in this podcast.

A comprehensive list of Dr. Pollack peer-review publications can be found on PubMed. The most recent and noteworthy articles Dr. Pollack has authored include—

• 2022 Impact of relative dose intensity of FOLFOX adjuvant chemotherapy on risk of death among stage III colon cancer patients.
• 2021 Proportion of never smokers among men and women with lung cancer in 7 US states.
• 2020 Population health informatics can advance interoperability: National Program of Cancer Registries electronic pathology reporting project.
• 2020 Breast and colorectal cancer recurrence and progression captured by five U.S. population-based registries: Findings from National Program of Cancer Registries patient-centered outcome research.
• 2020 Update: characteristics of a nationwide outbreak of e-cigarette, or vaping, product use-associated lung injury—United States, August 2019–January 2020.
• 2018 Racial and ethnic differences in survival of pediatric patients with brain and central nervous system cancer in the United States.
• 2018 Capture of tobacco use among population-based registries: Findings from 10 National Program of Cancer Registries states.
• 2016 Estimating national trends in inpatient antibiotic use among US hospitals from 2006 to 2012.
• 2016 A concise set of structure and process indicators to assess and compare antimicrobial stewardship programs among EU and US hospitals: results from a multinational expert panel.
• 2016 KRAS testing and first-line treatment among patients diagnosed with metastatic colorectal cancer using population data from ten National Program of Cancer Registries in the United States.
• 2014 Core elements of hospital antibiotic stewardship programs from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
• 2014 The role of public health in antimicrobial stewardship in healthcare.
• 2014 Estimates of young breast cancer survivors at risk for infertility in the U.S.
• 2011 Melanoma survival in the United States, 1992 to 2005.
• 2011 Dissemination and translation: a frontier for cancer survivorship research.
• 2010 A public health focus on infertility prevention, detection, and management.
• 2009 Care of long-term cancer survivors: physicians seen by Medicare enrollees surviving longer than 5 years.
• 2009 Enhancement of identifying cancer specialists through the linkage of Medicare claims to additional sources of physician specialty.
• 2006 Use of the spatial scan statistic to identify geographic variations in late stage colorectal cancer in California (United States).