Mitchell Katz

Mitchell Katz is currently the director of the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services. Dr. Katz started off as head of research in the AIDS Office in San Francisco’s public health department. He launched his rise through the ranks as the director or chief of the department’s other offices—including epidemiology, emergency medical services, and community health and safety—until he was named director of health in 1997. As the head of San Francisco’s Department of Health, he oversaw a $1.5 billion budget, about 8,600 employees, two hospitals, and nine health care centers. In 2007, Katz was one of several San Francisco health leaders who started Healthy San Francisco (HSF), a comprehensive medical care program for the city’s 60,000 uninsured adults. HSF provides outpatient, inpatient, laboratory, behavioral health, and pharmacy services at 14 public health clinics and a private hospital-based clinic. He also worked on an initiative that took more than 1,000 chronically homeless people out of shelters and placed them in supportive housing, and serves as principal investigator in three studies testing new drugs for treating children and adolescents with Crohn’s disease. Dr. Katz has published articles in the American Journal of Preventative Medicine, JAMA Internal Medicine, and Pain Practice. He has also published several books, including Multivariable Analysis: A Practical Guide for Clinicians and Public Health Researchers and Evaluating Clinical and Public Health Interventions: A Practical Guide to Study Design and Statistics. Katz earned a BA in psychology from Yale University and an MD from Harvard Medical School. He then completed his residency in internal medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, where he was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholar.