Elvin H. Geng, MD, MPH

2023 Dean’s Impact Award Recipient

Elvin H. Geng, MD, MPH, provided outstanding service to clinical operations and to the St. Louis County Department of Public Health during the pandemic. He developed the LEMMA model that was used as the basis of modeling hospitalizations during the pandemic, allowing accurate prediction of the epidemic locally, which facilitated resource planning and use. He collaborated with the county health department to develop a prevalence study that informed public policy, and he served as an advisor to the Missouri Department of Health & Senior Services. Later in the epidemic, he collaborated closely with the city of St. Louis and St. Louis County to increase COVID vaccination rates in underrepresented populations. He published important papers that informed public policy — demonstrating the impact of the county’s lockdown, racial disparities in the state’s COVID testing rollout and later disparities in the vaccine rollout. He also published several important papers evaluating vaccine hesitancy. Even with this additional workload, his research group continued to perform high-quality and impactful HIV implementation science with more than 30 publications in this space since 2021.