Dr. Pumerantz is Associate Professor and Division Chief of Infectious Disease. He joined WesternU/COMP in 2007 after practicing consultative infectious diseases in the New York City Metro area for 12 years. Over the past 5 years at COMP, Dr. Pumerantz led a pre-clerkship curricular change from traditional lecture-based to a more case-based, interactive learning approach designed to foster student critical-thinking skills and diagnostic acumen. Within the pre-clerkship systems, he overhauled and redesigned the infectious disease components and helped guide the broader internal medicine curricular development. From 2008-2012, as Internal Medicine Department Chair, Dr. Pumerantz developed and recruited full-time faculty for the Divisions of Endocrinology, Diabetes, and Metabolism; Nephrology and Hypertension; Infectious Disease; and Cardiovascular Disease. In 2009, he established the Western Diabetes Institute (WDI), as an integrated practice, education, and research unit, and now serves as its Executive Director as well as WesternU's Assistant Provost for Strategic Initiatives. At the WDI, Dr. Pumerantz created a novel composite disease severity-staging tool, the Diabetes Cross-Disciplinary Index (DXDI©), designed to reframe diabetes and facilitate patient-centric, interprofessional, team-based assessment and management across the total care cycle. With an interest in infections to which patients with diabetes are predisposed, Dr. Pumerantz co-invented PEGylated liposomal vancomycin (PLV) in 2008, and serves as the PI for ongoing translational research studies evaluating the efficacy of PLV in treating MRSA pneumonia. To date, he has spoken at international scientific meetings and published four peer-reviewed papers on PLV. Dr. Pumerantz is also a Fellow of the American College of Physicians (ACP) and serves as Treasurer of ACP Southern California Region II.