Dean-David Schillinger MD is a primary care physician, scientist, author, and public health advocate. He is an internationally recognized expert in health communication and has been widely recognized for his work related to improving the health of marginalized populations. He is credited with a number of discoveries in primary care and health communication and is considered a pioneer of the field of health literacy. He is the inaugural recipient of the Andrew B. Bindman Professorship in Primary Care and Health Policy at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF).

Dr. Schillinger has served as chief of the UCSF Division of General Internal Medicine at San Francisco General Hospital, and chief of the Diabetes Prevention and Control Program for the California Department of Public Health. In 2006, he co-founded the UCSF Center for Vulnerable Populations, a leading research center committed to addressing the social, environmental and commercial determinants of health through research, education, policy, and practice. He currently directs the UCSF Health Communications Research Program.

Research and Writing

Dr. Schillinger has been awarded grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and private foundations, carrying out a number of studies exploring the impact of limited health literacy on the prevention and control of diabetes and heart disease, and developing and evaluating community-based communication interventions in vulnerable populations with chronic disease. He co-authored and edited the only medical textbook of its kind, Medical Care of Vulnerable and Underserved Patients and co-directs a national course on this topic for healthcare providers. He has published over 300 peer-reviewed articles in such high-impact journals as The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), The New England Journal of Medicine, and Annals of Internal Medicine. His clinical vignettes and patient narratives have been published in The Journal of the American Medical Association and Intima, and one of his stories (The Disability Blues) was featured in A Piece of My Mind (2006), a collection of impactful physician essays from the last 25 years.

Public Health Advocacy

Working at a large, urban public hospital with a diverse population, Dr. Schillinger felt the medical and scientific communities were not adequately addressing the healthcare challenges faced by socioeconomically disadvantaged patients. This inspired him to focus his work on addressing issues ranging from limited literacy, food insecurity, homelessness and housing instability, language barriers, to poor access to care.

Dr. Schillinger’s medical and public career was shaped by AIDS. At SFGH, he worked with colleagues to fight an epidemic whose arc has included painful struggles against an unknown vector and the witnessing of countless deaths, to attempts to delay death and mitigate suffering by preventing disease complications to, most recently, implementing novel and life-saving treatments to both extend life and prevent infection. In recent years, Dr. Schillinger has called for a “public health war” against the contemporary epidemic of Type 2 Diabetes, a disease that disproportionately affects vulnerable populations. He served as the Chief Medical Officer for the Diabetes Prevention and Control Program for The California Department of Public Health from 2008-13, and has been instrumental in local public health regulation of sugary drinks. In 2016, he served as the scientific expert for the City and County of San Francisco in defense of a lawsuit filed in Federal Court by the American Beverage Association for an injunction against the City’s ordinance to mandate health warning labels on billboards advertising sugary drinks. He is currently evaluating the effects of sugary beverage taxation in select California cities and the impacts of employer-based sugary drink bans on employee health.

Dr. Schillinger recently completed a 3-year term as a co-chair of the Diabetes Prevention Sub-Committee of the Congressionally-chartered National Clinical Care Commission. His efforts led the Commission to advocate that diabetes be addressed not only as a biomedical problem, but also as a societal one. This resulting report made transformative recommendations to Congress for an all-of-government approach to preventing and controlling diabetes.

Communicating for Health

Dr. Schillinger also co-created a youth-led diabetes prevention social media campaign called The Bigger Picture. This innovative communication campaign, which brings together the fields of Art and Public Health, encourages youth and young adults of color to use spoken word poetry as a means of combating type 2 diabetes. Reframing the epidemic as a disease driven by unjust social and environmental forces, the young poets and The Bigger Picture campaign have received numerous public health, film and media awards, including the 2014 Latino Coalition for a Healthy California Award for Youth Leadership, the Spirit of 1848 Social Justice Award from the American Public Health Association and the Real Food Media Award. The Bigger Picture’s short films have had >1.5 million views to date, and the campaign has been adopted by a number of California counties. The campaign was highlighted in a film about Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food. The campaign, along with Dr. Schillinger’s clinical and public health battles against diabetes, were featured in a 2020 PBS documentary on the diabetes epidemic.

Personal Life

Dr. Schillinger was born and raised in Buffalo, NY, in a household in which 5 languages were spoken. He is the son of immigrant parents: his father is a Hungarian Holocaust survivor and refugee of the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary, and his mother an immigrant to the US from Chile via Israel. He attended Brown University, where he studied Russian Language & Literature, and obtained his medical degree in 1991 from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. He performed his residency training at UCSF and, at the peak of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, he served as Chief Medical Resident at SFGH before joining the faculty there. He is married to Ariella Hyman, a public interest attorney who serves as Director of Program and Advocacy at Bay Area Legal Aid. He has 20 year-old twin sons who are jazz musicians and a 12 year-old daughter who is an accomplished violinist. He has a black cat named Pandora, but his true love is his border collie, Luna. He plays the oboe and the saxophone, swims daily in the frigid waters of San Francisco Bay, and enjoys soccer, skiing, hiking and reading fiction.