Nam Tran, PhD
UC Davis, Sacramento, California, USA

Dr. Tran is Professor and Senior Director of Clinical Pathology at UC Davis Health. As a board-certified clinical chemist, he presently also directs the clinical chemistry laboratory and point-of-care testing services. He received his PhD in Comparative Pathology in 2008. Thereafter he completed postdoctoral training under the NIH funded Point-of-Care Technologies Center focused on molecular infectious disease testing in critical, emergency and disaster care. In 2011 he was appointed to the UC Davis faculty as an Assistant Professor and received an NHLBI K12 Emergency Medicine training award. His research interests include studying and implementing biomarkers of acute injury, development of point-of-care diagnostics, application of machine learning in laboratory diagnostics, and infectious disease testing. In 2020, following his appointment as Senior Director of Clinical Pathology, he was tasked to lead the UC Davis Health effort to deploy SARS-CoV-2 diagnostics. In this role, his team helped deploy one of the first SARS-CoV-2 PCR tests in the region and developed means to scale testing capacity to meet community needs. Dr. Tran is also a member of the California State COVID-19 Testing Task Force and previous served on the UC Office of the President / UC Health Workgroup for recommending testing strategies for the 10 UC academic campuses.