Dr. Talan received his medical degree from the University of Illinois Medical College in Chicago and completed his residencies in Internal and Emergency Medicine and fellowship in Infectious Diseases at UCLA and its associated medical centers. He is board-certified in Internal Medicine, Emergency Medicine, and Infectious Diseases and Professor of Medicine in Residence (Emeritus) at The David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and the University of Iowa School of Medicine.

From 1993 to 2014, Dr. Talan was Chairman of the Olive View-UCLA Department of Emergency Medicine. He is currently faculty of the Department of Emergency Medicine, and Department of Medicine at UCLA Ronald Reagan Medical Center, and recently joined the University of Iowa Hospitals & Clinics in the Departments of Emergency Medicine and Infectious Diseases. He is a Fellow of the American College of Emergency Physicians and the Infectious Diseases Society of America.

Dr. Talan is considered an authority in the area of acute infections that result in severe morbidity and death. His research focuses on emergency department-based surveillance and epidemiological research of emerging infections and clinical investigations of acute infectious diseases. He is the principal investigator (PI) of a CDC-supported emergency department-based national sentinel network for research on emerging infectious diseases in the United States called EMERGEncy ID NET, which was established in 1995. He was PI of an NIH contract to study off-patent antibiotics to treat skin and soft tissue infections caused by community-associated MRSA called STOP MRSA. Dr. Talan has several publications in the New England Journal of Medicine and JAMA, including the seminal research on the emergence of community-associated-MRSA infections. He has also been the principal or a leading investigator on a number of studies. One of which led to the American College of Surgeons to change its guidelines to include antibiotics as a first-line treatment option for appendicitis, and another, where the early release of interim vaccine effectiveness results led to the CDC’s decision to revise its mask mandate