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Branko Kopjar is a physician and epidemiologist at the University of Washington.
He is best known for his work in the 1990’s related to injury prevention and his later work on spine and spinal cord injury research. He has authored or co-authored more than 500 articles, reports, reviews and abstracts. His work has been published in the Journal of Neurosurgery, American Journal of Public Health, Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery, and other peer-reviewed journals. Some of his previous appointments include serving as the Research Director for the Norwegian Foundation for Health Services Research and Head of the Section for Preventive Medicine at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health. He was a participant at the World Injury Conference meetings held in Melbourne, Australia in 1995.
In 2013, he was a co-author on a paper which for the first time showed that surgical decompression is an effective procedure to treat cervical spondylotic myelopathy, a common disease of the spine that can lead to paralysis.
Dr. Kopjar’s work has been recognized with several awards including the John M. Eisenberg Best Paper Award issued by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, and the 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2016 Best Paper or Outstanding Paper Awards issued by the North American Spine Society.
Dr. Kopjar was elected a Fellow of the American College of Epidemiology in 2015 and he holds: Doctor of Medicine, Doctor of Philosophy and Master of Science degrees.
As of 2017, Dr. Kopjar is a faculty member and the program director for the Executive Master of Public Health program at the University of Washington School of Public Health. The MPH program is consistently ranked as one of the top 10 in the United States. He is also a faculty member in the Master of Health Administration program at the same university, which is also a top 10 program. In 2014, Dr. Kopjar was honored with a five-year Distinguished Professorship at Chongqing Medical University in Chongqing, P.R. China.