Director, Division of Infectious Diseases

The University of Alabama at Birmingham Department of Medicine has selected Jorge Martin Rodriguez, M.D., FACP, FIDSA as the next Division Director of Infectious Diseases.

Dr. Rodriguez has served as the Paul W. Burleson, M.D. Endowed Professor of Medicine at UAB, Director of Clinical Activities for the Division of Infectious Diseases, Tinsley Harrison Clinical Scholar and Quality Director for the General Medicine S9 Service for the Department of Medicine, and was Interim Division Director for the UAB Division of Infectious Diseases. He has spent most of his career at UAB; completing his training in Internal Medicine and Chief Resident year at UAB prior to moving to Boston in 2003 for his Infectious Diseases fellowship at Massachusetts General Hospital. Following that, he went back to Alabama as UAB faculty in the UAB Montgomery program in 2005, working as faculty in a designated underserved area and changing his visa from J-1 exchange status to a permanent residency followed by US citizenship. In 2009, he moved back to Birmingham and joined the Division of Infectious Diseases, where he has worked since then. 

Recognized as an expert clinician and medical educator, Dr. Rodriguez has received numerous teaching and clinical excellence awards over the years.  In 2023, he received the President’s Award for Excellence in Teaching in the UAB Heersink School of Medicine. In his role as expert diagnostician, he evaluates adult patients in the UAB Undiagnosed Diseases Program (UDP), which has evaluated hundreds of patients with challenging presentations and has reached diagnoses in over half of the cases. The UAB UDP is now part of the NIH funded Undiagnosed Diseases Network.

In his leadership role for the Tinsley Harrison General Medicine Service, the flagship teaching service for the Department of Medicine, Dr. Rodriguez has seen great improvements in educational value, quality, and outcomes. The service has consistently shown an observed/expected mortality ratio that is below benchmarks (better) locally and nationally. The service is recognized by colleagues and peers as an outstanding service that provides excellent care for patients and offers great educational experiences. Many quality initiatives at UAB Hospital started on this unit and now have been expanded to other units. Under the leadership of Dr. Rodriguez the educational value of the service improved dramatically, being ranked as the top teaching service for many years in a row. Dr. Rodriguez also leads the weekly Tinsley Harrison Clinical Reasoning Conference which has been ranked as the top teaching conference in the Department of Medicine for over a decade now. He also has been an invited professor for the internationally recognized Gorgas Course in Tropical Medicine for over 15 years.

As Director for Clinical Activities, Dr. Rodriguez has led many initiatives for the division of Infectious Diseases. He started the automatic ID consult process for bacteremia due to Staphylococcus aureus, later expanded to include Enterococcus and Candida, also performed the first fecal microbiota transplant (FMT) in the region and later created the FMT program for Clostridioides difficile infections, started the UAB Outpatient Antimicrobial Program (OPAT) that has treated over 11000 patients allowing them to have earlier discharges and safer care with reduced readmissions, and also expanded the clinical services in the ambulatory and inpatient settings, significantly growing the volume of patients seen by ID. 

Randi Herrick led this search with Jasmine Miller and Rachel Banderob.