Richard B. Brooks MD, MPH
Associate Professor of Medicine, George Washington University Medical Officer, Veterans Affairs Medical Center, Washington, DC. CDR, Commissioned Corps of the U.S. Public Health Service
VA Washington DC health care
Dr. Brooks attended medical school at Duke University, and while there, also obtained a Masters degree in Public Health from the University of North Carolina.
He completed his internship and residency in Internal Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) in 2008 and worked as a hospitalist there and at The George Washington University (GWU) Hospital in Washington, DC for several years afterwards. At both UCSF and GWU, Dr. Brooks held leadership positions in the Internal Medicine residency programs. In 2011, Dr. Brooks was awarded the UCSF Haile T. Debas Academy of Medical Educators Excellence in Teaching Award and in 2013, he received the Floyd C. Rector, Jr. Housestaff Teaching Award from the UCSF Department of Medicine. In 2015, he was awarded the GWU Department of Medicine Attending of the Year Award.
Dr. Brooks left GWU in 2015 to enter the U.S. Public Health Service (USPHS) and to complete two years of field epidemiology training with the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)'s Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS), stationed at the Maryland Department of Health. Following completion of his EIS training, Dr. Brooks continued with CDC at the Maryland Department of Health as a Medical Officer for CDC's Division of Healthcare Quality Promotion. In this role, he served as a subject matter expert in antibiotic resistance and healthcare associated infections for the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States. He deployed with CDC in 2016 to Sierra Leone to provide technical assistance to the Sierra Leone Trial to Introduce a Vaccine against Ebola (STRIVE), and again in 2019 to Kasese, Uganda, to provide infection prevention and control expertise to help prevent the introduction of Ebola from the Democratic Republic of Congo. Additionally, he deployed with the USPHS in 2017 to Atlanta, Georgia, to provide case management for people displaced as a result of Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria.
Continuing as an officer in the USPHS but returning to clinical practice in 2020, Dr. Brooks joined the hospitalist section at the Washington, DC VA Medical Center. Here, he splits his time between providing clinical care to veterans admitted on the inpatient Medicine service and serving as one of the hospital epidemiologists-working to detect, prevent, and control the spread of antibiotic-resistant and healthcare-associated infections.