Professor Francesco Chiappelli

Professor Francesco Chiappelli

Editor-in-Chief: Francesco Chiappelli

Francesco Chiappelli is European-born and raised. He came to the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) as a foreign student in 1972, obtained a Bachelor’s (1975, Neurobiology), Master’s (1981, Research Methodology & Statistics) and PhD degrees (1986, Counselling Psychology) at UCLA. Following his post-doctoral training at UCLA (1987-1990, Psychoneuroimmunology and NIAID Fundamental & Clinical Immunology), and two years of additional training at the UCLA-Harbor Country Hospital (Biological Psychiatry), he obtained his first 5-yrs NIH grant and established his laboratory on the grounds of the West Los Angeles Veterans’ Administration, with a joint appointment on the research faculty at UCLA (1992-1994, Anatomy & Cell Biology).  In 1994, he was recruited by the UCLA School of Dentistry for his work on mind-body connections, and the impact of (dental) anxiety on cellular immune surveillance. He has remained on the UCLA Dentistry faculty ever since.  He established the first curriculum in evidence-based dentistry/comparative effectiveness research in dentistry in the US at UCLA, and diverted his research interest from neuroendocrine-immune modulation to comparative effectiveness research and translational effectiveness in the late 1990's.  For his work in this field, he was elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and was conferred an honorary doctorate.  He has published close to 200 peer-reviewed articles and several books on the topic of translational effectiveness and comparative effectiveness research, and continues to write actively in the field (Fundamentals of Evidence-Based Health Care and Translational Science, Springer-Verlag, 2014; Comparative Effectiveness Research, Nova 2016; Getting & Analyzing Data for Translational Effectiveness Research, Springer US, In progress anticipated 2017).  He collaborates widely across the world in this field, in part through the Evidence-Based Decision-Practice-Based Research Network he founded and directs, from Europe, to Australia, from Brazil to the Philippines. Professor Chiappelli mentors US and foreign graduate students, who come from Nigeria to Saudi Arabia for his training and mentorship.  He also contributes to the didactic program of the Health Sciences department at the California State University, Northridge.

Comparative effectiveness research is the principal foundation of translational science, which is the new frontiers of health care in the 21st century. Translational science consists on the one hand of translational research - going from the patient to the laboratory to identify the basic biological pathology of the condition, back to the patient now armed with the biological understanding to optimize the treatment intervention. The other side of that coin lies in the fact that there exists today a plethora of research on given pathological processes (cf. Archibald Cochrane): comparative effectiveness research refers to the systematic process that actualizes translational effectiveness, and validates the identification of the best available evidence in support of a given treatment. Comparative effectiveness research is a question/hypothesis-driven (PICOTS question initiated by the patient-clinician encounter) systematic process of investigation that utilizes a well-characterized research design (research synthesis), methodology (analytical framework yielding the sample bibliome; validated tools for assessing the quality of the evidence and the risk of bias), and data analysis (acceptable sampling, meta-analysis). To ensure translational effectiveness, the best available evidence obtained by comparative effectiveness research must be effectively disseminated to all stakeholders. In brief, comparative effectiveness research is one essential component of translational effectiveness:  other compartments of the same include the fields of bioinformation for best available evidence dissemination, health literacy, and stakeholder engagement.  That is the focus of our journal, Comparative Effectiveness Research, under Professor Chiappelli as Editor-in-Chief.

Taken together, translational research and translational effectiveness are the very core of contemporary health care - from medicine and dentistry, to nursing, to clinical psychology and allied health care fields, which converge to enrich each other. Under Dr. Chiappelli's leadership, our journal, Comparative Effectiveness Research, continues to play a timely and critical role in improving modern health care by improving the science of obtaining, disseminating and utilizing the best available evidence for the benefit of the patients.