Adam Cifu

Adam Seth Cifu is an American physician, academic, author and researcher. He is a Professor of Medicine and Director of Academic Programming, Bucksbaum Institute for Clinical Excellence at the University of Chicago. Cifu has authored over 125 peer-reviewed publications on clinical practice, medical decision-making and medical reversal, and general internal medicine. He is the co-author of a textbook on clinical reasoning, Symptom to Diagnosis: An Evidence-Based Guide and a book about medical decision making for the lay audience, Ending Medical Reversal: Improving Outcomes, Saving Lives. He, together with Scott Stern, hosted the podcast S2D: The Symptom to Diagnosis Podcast and currently hosts The Clinical Excellence Podcast. Cifu attended the Dalton School in New York City. He then received his bachelor's degree with honors in Chemistry from Haverford College in 1989, and a Doctor of Medicine degree from Cornell University Medical College (now Weill Cornell Medicine) in 1993. He completed his internal medicine residency at the Beth Israel Hospital (now in Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center) in 1996, and then served as the Primary Care Chief Resident. Cifu started his career as a Clinical Fellow at Harvard Medical School in 1993, and became an instructor in Medicine in 1996. He then joined the faculty of the University of Chicago as an Assistant Professor of Medicine in 1997. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 2005, and to Professor of Medicine in 2013. Cifu's research is primarily focused on the evidence base of clinical practice. A medical reversal occurs when a robust clinical trial produces results that contradict existing clinical practice and the older, less methodologically sound, trials on which it is based. The term was coined in 2011 in an article by Vinay Prasad, Victor Gall and Adam Cifu published in the Archives of Internal Medicine (now JAMA Internal Medicine). Cifu and Prasad have published extensively on the topic.