Vincent J. Felitti, MD is co-Principal Investigator, with Robert F. Anda MD at the Centers for Disease Control, of the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study, ongoing collaborative research between the Kaiser Permanente Medical Care Program and the CDC.

The ACE Study explores prospectively and retrospectively in a 17,000 person cohort the profound relationship of ten categories of adverse life experiences in childhood to health, well-being, disease, and death decades later. A 1962 graduate of the Johns Hopkins Medical School, Dr. Felitti is an internist who started as an infectious disease physician in 1968 at Kaiser Permanente in San Diego and then in 1975 founded the Department of Preventive Medicine; he served as the Chief of Preventive Medicine until 2001. Under Dr. Felitti’s leadership over the years, the Department provided comprehensive, biopsychosocial medical evaluation to assess the health risks and disease burden of over one million individual adults. Major health-risk abatement programs were developed for obesity, smoking, and stress, as well as population-based screening for the genetic disease, Hemochromatosis. He is Clinical Professor of Medicine at the University of California and a Fellow of The American College of Physicians.