Brennan Spiegel

Brennan Spiegel, MD MSHS, is Director of Health Services Research at Cedars-Sinai, where he holds the George and Dorothy Gourrich Chair in Digital Health Ethics. He also leads the Master’s Degree Program in Health Systems Science and oversees the Center for Virtual Medicine and Health System Innovation, a multidisciplinary group that designs and tests digital tools to improve the delivery of medical care.

Dr. Spiegel’s work spans medicine, behavioral science, and emerging technology. His team collaborates with clinicians, engineers, and computer scientists to study how tools like biosensors, virtual reality, and generative AI can improve clinical outcomes and strengthen the therapeutic bond between patients and providers. His team helped define the field of Medical Extended Reality (Med XR) and built one of the largest, most widely studied clinical VR programs in the world.

He has published more than 300 peer-reviewed papers, including studies in Annals of Internal Medicine, Nature Digital Medicine, JAMA Network Open, and JAMA Surgery, and authored eight medical textbooks. He published the book "VRx: How Immersive Therapeutics Will Revolutionize Medicine," which was named by Wired Magazine as one of its top 8 science books of 2020, and most recently published "PULL: How Gravity Shapes Your Body, Steadies the Mind, and Guides Our Health,' which introduces the field of biogravitational medicine. He is founding editor of the Journal of Medical Extended Reality (J Med XR) and is the past Editor-in-Chief of the American Journal of Gastroenterology. His research has been funded by the NIH, VA, PCORI, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the State of California.

Dr. Spiegel’s work has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, NPR, Scientific American, and The Atlantic. He continues to practice clinical medicine and teaches graduate courses in digital health science, health analytics, and cost-effectiveness at Cedars-Sinai and UCLA. He was among the first group of clinical researchers to examine the gastrointestinal manifestations of COVID-19. He continues to practice clinical medicine and maintains an academic teaching practice at Cedars-Sinai. A prolific speaker, Spiegel is frequently invited to present on his areas of expertise at national and international events.

Dr. Spiegel earned his bachelor's degree from Tufts University, his medical degree from New York Medical College where he received Alpha Omega Alpha honors, and his master's from the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. He completed his residency in internal medicine at Cedars-Sinai and his gastroenterology fellowship at UCLA Medical Center.