Physician.
Professor.
Storyteller.
Brennan Spiegel, M.D., is a physician, professor, and storyteller whose work lives at the intersection of science, technology, and what it means to be human. He directs Health Services Research at Cedars-Sinai, where he holds the Gourrich Chair in Digital Health Ethics. His research explores how emotion, physical experience, and the mind-body connection shape health—and how innovations like virtual reality and AI can support healing. He lives in Los Angeles, where he’s often found balancing on a wobble board in his office while wearing a weighted vest.
More About Brennan…
Brennan 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 Virtual Medicine (vMed) Lab, a multidisciplinary group that designs and tests digital tools to improve medical care.
His work spans medicine, behavioral science, and emerging technology. Through vMed, he 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 and built one of the largest, most widely studied clinical VR programs in the world.
Brennan has published more than 300 peer-reviewed papers in Annals of Internal Medicine, Nature Digital Medicine, JAMA Network Open, and JAMA Surgery, and authored eight medical textbooks. He is founding editor of the Journal of Medical Extended Reality and formerly served as 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.
His 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.