Vincent J. Felitti, MD
Vincent J. Felitti, MD is a 1962 graduate of the Johns Hopkins Medical School. He is an internist who, subsequent to being Post Surgeon at the US Army Pine Bluff Arsenal, completed his training at Johns Hopkins and the University of Maryland and started as an infectious disease physician in 1968 at Kaiser Permanente in San Diego and then in 1975 founded the Department of Preventive Medicine; he served as the Chief of Preventive Medicine until 2001. In that setting, Dr. Felitti became co-Principal Investigator, with Robert F. Anda MD at the Centers for Disease Control, of the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study, ongoing collaborative research between the Kaiser Permanente Medical Care Program and the CDC. The ACE Study with its more than eight publications explores prospectively and retrospectively in a 17,337-person cohort the profound relationship of ten categories of adverse life experiences in childhood to health, well being, disease, and death decades later.
Under Dr. Felitti’s leadership over the years, the Department of Preventive Medicine provided comprehensive, biopsychosocial medical evaluation to assess the health risks and disease burden of over one million individual adults. Major health-risk abatement programs were developed for obesity, smoking, and stress, as well as population-based screening for the genetic disease, Hemochromatosis. He is Clinical Professor of Medicine at the University of California and a Fellow of The American College of Physicians. He is Senior Editor of The Permanente Journal and on the International Editorial Board of the Swiss medical journal, Trauma and Gewalt. Dr. Felitti has served on advisory committees of the Institute of Medicine, the American Psychiatric Association, and on the Committee of the Secretary of Health and Human Services for Healthy People 2020.
