text: Branko Kopjar
  
  Branko Kopjar is a physician and epidemiologist at the University of Washington.
  
  He is best known for his contributions in the 1990s to the field of injury prevention and his later work on spine and spinal cord injury research. In addition, he has been published in several top journals in the fields of cardiology, oncology, public health, neurosurgery and orthopedics resulting in a total of more than 500 articles, reports, reviews and abstracts. Prior to joining the University of Washington, Dr. Kopjar served as the Research Director for the Norwegian Foundation for Health Services Research, Head of the Section for Preventive Medicine at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health and as a Ministerial Adviser on health policy to two European governments. He was a participant at the World Injury Conference meetings held in Melbourne, Australia in 1995.
  
  Some of his most notable publications include a 2002 sole-authorship which showed that Azithromycin is effective in patients with chronic bronchitis. The findings were published in the Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy.
  
  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.
  
  In 2016, he was a co-author on a paper which showed that surgical intervention, in combination with radiation and chemotherapy, improves outcomes for patients whose cancer has metastasized to the spinal cord.
  
  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. He is a member of the North American Spine Society's Performance Measurement Committee and its Outcomes Compendium Task Force.
  
  Dr. Kopjar is a Fellow of the American College of Epidemiology. and of the Academy of Translational Medicine. He holds a Doctor of Medicine and a Doctor of Philosophy in Health Economics and Epidemiology. Dr. Kopjar also holds a Master of Science in biostatistics and as part of his post-graduate work he completed a research fellowship in health statistics.
  
  In 2017 he was appointed as a visiting consultant to the Royal Orthopaedic Hospital, a National Health Service hospital in Northfield, England. As of 2019, 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 to the Orthopaedic Department at Chongqing Medical University in Chongqing, P.R. China., a World Health Organization-recognized teaching hospital.
  
  References
  
  Category:University of Washington faculty
  Category:American public health doctors
  Category:Chongqing University faculty
  Category:Year of birth missing (living people)
  Category:Living people