Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology
University of Pittsburgh
Dr. Harrison is an infectious diseases physician, Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology, and Director of the Center for Genomic Epidemiology at the University of Pittsburgh. He is an alumnus of CDC’s Epidemic Intelligence Service, where he served in the former Meningitis and Special Pathogens Branch.
Dr. Harrison’s studies the epidemiology and genomic epidemiology of vaccine-preventable and drug-resistant bacterial pathogens, including Neisseria meningitidis. He is academic principal investigator of the Active Bacterial Core surveillance (ABCs) component of the Maryland Emerging Infections Program. He has been continuously funded by CDC and NIH for over twenty years. Dr. Harrison has also worked globally for many years on various aspects of infectious diseases epidemiology and genomics, with a current focus in Mozambique, South Africa, and Brazil.
A major focus of Dr. Harrison’s current research is the Enhanced Detection System for Healthcare-Acquired Transmission (EDS-HAT), whose aim is to develop novel methods for outbreak detection in hospitals. EDS-HAT, which was developed at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center-Presbyterian Hospital (UPMC), uses a combination of bacterial genomic surveillance for outbreak detection and artificial intelligence of the electronic health record for rapidly identifying the responsible transmission route. A comparison of EDS-HAT and traditional whole genome sequencing (WGS) in reaction to suspected outbreaks demonstrated that EDS-HAT identified many otherwise undetected outbreaks and that reactive sequencing was ineffective.
Based on these results and the potential improvement in patient safety, EDS-HAT is currently running in real time at UPMC. This is done in close collaboration with our infection prevention and control team, so that interventions can be instituted as soon as outbreaks are detected after just two cases. In addition, we are studying the potential impact of including respiratory viruses into EDS-HAT, genomic and bioinformatics methods for tracking horizontal transfer of antibiotic-resistant plasmids among multiple bacterial species in the hospital, and the potential use of in silico multi-locus variable number tandem repeat analysis to discriminate among strains of Clostridioides difficile that do not differ by WGS.