J. Perren Cobb, MD, FACS, FCCM, is Director of Surgical Critical Care at Keck Medicine of USC, University of Southern California.  At the Keck School of Medicine of USC, he holds the rank of Professor and Clinical Scholar, Departments of Surgery and Anesthesiology.  His academic interest is systems approaches to clinical quality improvement and preparedness for research emergencies. 

Dr. Cobb was an undergraduate at Vanderbilt University (ΡΒΚ) and received his medical degree from the University of Louisville School of Medicine (ΑΟΑ).  He trained in General Surgery at the University of California-San Francisco and completed fellowships in critical care at the NIH and the University of Pittsburgh.  Prior to moving to Los Angeles, Dr. Cobb was on the faculty at Washington University in St. Louis (Professor) and at Harvard University (Associate Professor). 

His early research focus was the treatment of sepsis; he worked nationally with trauma collaborators to develop a novel sepsis diagnostic, the riboleukogram, which uses contemporary genomics and microfluidics technology to track the host response to injury and infection.  More recently, he’s worked with federal partners to establish new capabilities to conduct clinical research during public health emergencies, in the process standardizing data collection, analysis, and reporting tools.  Dr. Cobb was founding Director of the U.S. Critical Illness and Injury Trials Group (now the Discovery Clinical Research Network), which fosters investigator-initiated hypothesis testing and strategic planning at the national level for critical illness and injury research.  He is also a former President of the Association for Academic Surgery. 

Dr. Cobb’s work has been supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the U.S. Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Biomedical Advanced Research Development Authority (BARDA), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the CDC Foundation, the American Association for the Surgery of Trauma, the Society of Critical Care Medicine, and the Barnes-Jewish Hospital Foundation.  His awards include the Research Scholarship Award of the American Association for the Surgery of Trauma, the Founders Grant for Critical Care Research of the Society of Critical Care Medicine, the George H. A. Clowes, Jr. Memorial Research Career Development Award of the American College of Surgeons, the 2nd Annual Critical Care Medicine Distinguished Alumnus of the University of Pittsburgh, and the H. Richard Nesson Award for Excellence in Collaboration from Partners Healthcare (now Mass General Brigham).