LEADERSHIP

Russ Fine, PhD, MSPH

ICRC Director and Principal Investigator
Acting Rehabilitation Core Director
SCIB Director and Principal Investigator
Professor of Medicine, UAB School of Medicine
Professor of Health Care Organization and Policy, UAB School of Public Health

Dr. Russ Fine, an injury epidemiologist/biostatistician by training, is the founding director and principal investigator of the University of Alabama at Birmingham’s Injury Control Research Center (UAB ICRC). He supervises and directs the UAB ICRC’s overall operations and has final responsibility for decisions regarding program, management, fiscal, and policy-related matters.

Dr. Fine is a graduate of Southern Illinois University, the University of Missouri Medical Center, and the University of Oklahoma Medical Center. He has experience in many areas of public health and injury control, from investigating commercial and private aviation crash sites for the Federal Aviation Administration to establishing and directing the Illinois Department of Public Health’s Statewide Pediatric Lead Poisoning Program.

Dr. Fine was recruited by UAB’s Department of Rehabilitation Medicine in late 1974 and he achieved the rank of full tenured professor in 1983. While with the Department of Rehabilitation Medicine he served as its director of research and scientific affairs, director of research for the NIDRR-sponsored Medical Rehabilitation Research and Training Center in Spinal Cord Dysfunction, co-director of the UAB Spinal Cord Injury Care System, and co-director of the National Spinal Cord Injury Statistical Center.

In 1988, Dr. Fine was appointed professor of medicine in the UAB Department of Medicine’s Division of Clinical Immunology and Rheumatology. Dr. Fine holds secondary appointments in the UAB School of Public Health’s Department of Health Care Organization and Policy and in UAB’s Graduate School. He is a Fellow of the American College of Epidemiology and a member of numerous professional organizations, including the American Congress of Rehabilitation Medicine, the World Federation of Neurology, the New York Academy of Sciences, and the Society of Sigma Chi. Dr. Fine served as chairman of the late Governor George Wallace’s Task Force on Drunk Driving for the state of Alabama and is cofounder of Mothers Against Drunk Driving in Alabama, serving as president of that organization in Jefferson County from 1984 to 1986.

He is the author or coauthor of more than 100 contributions to scientific literature and has been awarded numerous funded and peer-reviewed scientific research grants and contracts that have brought nearly $46 million to UAB since 1975. In 1993, the story of his relationship with a despondent quadriplegic contemplating suicide was the subject of The Switch, a widely acclaimed made-for-television movie that was broadcast nationwide on the CBS television network.