Dr. David Penson

Dr. David Penson, MD, MPH, MMHC, is Professor and Chair of the Department of Urology at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. He is the Director of the Center for Surgical Quality and Outcomes Research in the Vanderbilt Institute for Medicine and Public Health and maintains a keen interest in health policy and improving the quality of care in the U.S. He received his medical degree from Boston University School of Medicine, and then pursued his urology residency at the University of California, Los Angeles. He then completed a fellowship in the Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program at Yale University alongside his MPH degree.

He currently maintains a clinical practice in urologic oncology at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.Dr. Penson is also very active in the field of health policy. In addition to serving as Chairman of the American Urological Association's Public Policy Council, Dr. Penson has served on various committees in the National Quality Forum, the Ambulatory Quality Alliance, the AMA Physician Consortium for Quality Improvement and AHRQ's National Advisory Council.

Dr. Penson’s clinical interests include clinical prostate and bladder cancer care. He is a well-known health services researcher, and focuses on the comparative effectiveness of treatments for localized prostate cancer. He is the Principal Investigator (PI) of the Prostate Cancer Outcomes Study (PCOS), a large population-based study of prostate cancer survivors funded by the NCI that includes the longest longitudinal patient-reported follow-up in the field. Dr. Penson was the original PI of the CEASAR study (which is now led by Dr. Dan Barocas), a comparative effectiveness study of surgery vs. radiation for localized prostate cancer, funded by the US Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) and the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI). Over 3600 men have been enrolled in the CEASAR study that will determine "what works, in which patients and in whose hands." Dr. Penson's work has been published in a variety of journals, including the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, Health Affairs and JNCI.