Dr. Alexander Lepak is a faculty member in the Division of Infectious Disease within the Department of Medicine. He is involved in medical education and is a course and clinical rotation instructor for medical students, residents, and fellows. He is an active clinician providing inpatient and outpatient Infectious Disease consultation care for patients with general, transplant, and surgical infectious diseases. He leads the antimicrobial stewardship efforts and is both medical director and chair of the antimicrobial use committee. He founded and directs the Stewardship Research Group (SRG), which targets numerous quality improvement projects yearly. He is a member of multiple international professional societies including the Infectious Disease Society of America (IDSA), the European Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Disease (ESCMID), and the American Society for Microbiology (ASM). He is an active participant in these societies including reviewing abstracts, presenting research work (often with trainees) at their annual meetings, and presenting and moderating conference symposia. He has served on the editorial board of Diagnostic Microbiology and Infectious Disease and Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy and is an active reviewer for numerous peer-reviewed journals. He also participates on numerous UW Health and Department of Medicine committees. He has been named a Fellow by the Infectious Disease Society of America (IDSA). Fellowship in IDSA is one of the highest honors in the field of infectious diseases, recognizing distinguished clinicians and scientists from the United States and around the world who have achieved professional excellence and provided significant service to the profession.
Dr. Lepak’s clinical interests are adult general infectious diseases, transplant infectious diseases, and surgical infectious diseases, such as orthopedic infections. He is the medical director for Infectious Diseases eConsults at UW Health.
View Dr. Lepak's publications on NCBI My Bibliography
Dr. Lepak’s research pursuits are in performing and translating antimicrobial pharmacodynamic (PD) studies (both in vivo animal models and patient level data) to optimize therapy against numerous pathogens. The PD lab uses established mouse models of infection to describe exposure-response relationships for antimicrobial therapy. These studies are used to refine and optimize current antimicrobial therapies as well as for novel drugs in development. Nearly all established and novel drug classes have been studied and optimized through PD study at the University of Wisconsin. Dr. Lepak also actively participates in antibiotic stewardship quality improvement and research projects.
He has received numerous awards including the Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award (T32), George McCracken Infectious Disease Fellow (American Society for Microbiology), and the ASM/ESCMID Young Investigator Award. His research and clinical expertise in pharmacodynamics and infectious diseases has led to advisory roles with the United States Committee on Antimicrobial Susceptibility Testing (USCAST), the Clinical and Laboratory Standards Institute (CLSI), and U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).