Romain Pirracchio, MD, MPH, PhD, FCCM, Appointed Associate and Statistical Editor for JAMA

We are delighted to announce that Romain Pirracchio, MD, PhD, the inaugural Ronald D. Miller distinguished professor in Anesthesia and Perioperative Care at UCSF and the chief of Anesthesia and Perioperative Care at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital, has been appointed as an associate and statistical editor at the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).

Pirracchio received his medical degree from Lariboisiere Medical School, Paris Diderot University. He then completed a fellowship in critical care at Hôpital Lariboisière, where he subsequently joined the faculty. He also earned a doctoral degree in epidemiology and biostatistics at Paris Diderot University, then completed a postdoc in biostatistics at UC Berkeley.

Prior to his appointment as a visiting associate professor at UCSF in 2015, Pirracchio achieved the highest French academic degree of Habilitation, and served as both an assistant professor in anesthesiology and critical care and as the head of Surgical and Trauma Critical Care at the Hôpital Européen Georges Pompidou at Paris Descartes University.

His research interests include: evaluation of cardiovascular life support therapies; evaluation of the prognosis of patients in anesthesiology and/or critical care, with a special interest in elderly patients; evaluation and optimization of daily cares in the intensive care unit (ICU). He is also actively involved in biostatistics research, with a broad interest in problems of causal inference and prediction. In particular, Pirrachio enjoys working on the development of novel methodologies for addressing scientific questions using complex observational data subject to sampling biases.

Recently, Pirracchio and a team at UC Berkeley built a clinical prediction model that combined many smaller prediction models (this combined model is known as an ensemble or a Super Learner). The model used various aspects of a patient’s health such as their cardiovascular health, respiratory health, history of hospital use, and age to predict the patient’s risk for developing PASC/Long COVID. This project won third place in the NIH’s Long COVID Computational Challenge (L3C). In a study published on May 22, 2023 in the New England Journal of Medicine, first author Pirracchio and team performed a meta-analysis of the effect of hydrocortisone on patients with septic shock by pooling individual data from studies conducted between 1998 and 2019, that showed,

“For the first time, the effects of hydrocortisone for the treatment of patients with septic shock could be studied by analyzing individual data from the main randomized trials published to date,” said Pirracchio. “This study shows that if the effect of hydrocortisone on the mortality of septic shock is modest, this treatment makes it possible to spare the exposure of patients to vasopressor drugs and to prevent their complications.”

Pirracchio will apply his extensive clinical and research experience to his role as associate and statistical editor at JAMA.

Please join us in congratulating him on this prestigious appointment.