M. Kit Delgado

Kit Delgado is the faculty director of the Nudge Unit. He is also an associate professor of emergency medicine and epidemiology at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine, an attending physician in the emergency department at Penn Presbyterian Medical Center, an associate director at the Center for Health Incentives and Behavioral Economics, and co-chair of Penn Medicine's opioid task force.

Kit's research blends behavioral and data science with insights gleaned from practicing emergency medicine in an urban trauma center to guide patients and clinicians toward decisions that enhance personal safety and improve the quality of acute care. He is passionate about leading multidisciplinary teams to address pressing public health problems. His portfolio includes work to curb the opioid crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic, reduce trauma and firearm injuries, and decrease distracted and alcohol-impaired driving.

Consistent throughout Kit's work is an effort to redesign choice environments to make the safe choice the easy and more attractive choice. To this end, he uses a broad set of methodological approaches, including implementation science methods for stakeholder engagement, observational comparative effectiveness methods for analyzing hospital encounter data, and pragmatic randomized trials of digital behavioral interventions delivered via electronic health records, automated text messaging, and smartphone apps. He is a leader in learning health systems research, and many of the interventions his teams have developed and implemented have been scaled as the standard of care at Penn Medicine. Kit co-directs Penn PORTAL (Patient-Oriented Research and Training to Accelerate Learning), one of 16 U.S. centers of excellence in learning health system science.

Kit's achievements have been recognized with the Academy Health Publication-of-the-Year Award, the Society for Medical Decision Making Lee Lusted Prize for Outstanding Research, the Penn Medicine Marjorie A. Bowman New Investigator Research Award, and being named a Philadelphia Citizen Generation Change Fellow. Kit is board certified in emergency medicine and addiction medicine. He received his bachelor's degree in public policy from Princeton University, his medical degree from the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University, and his master's degree in health services research from Stanford University.