Robert B. Baron MD, MS

A graduate of Princeton University (1971), Dr. Baron received a Masters Degree in Nutrition from the University of Wisconsin, Madison (1974) and his M.D. Degree from UCSF (1978). He did his residency training in UCSF's Primary Care Internal Medicine Residency Program.

A member of the UCSF faculty since 1981, Dr. Baron integrates his interests in primary care internal medicine and nutrition and obesity in clinical practice, education, and scholarship. As a practicing internist, he has been recognized as one of " America's Top Doctors" and as one of the "Outstanding Primary Care Physicians in the U.S." In addition to his practice in primary care, he founded and continues to direct the UCSF Weight Management Program. This interdisciplinary program, including physicians, dietician, psychologist, offers state of the art therapy for all stages of overweight and obesity. Interventions include individual counseling and treatment, group visits and meal replacement therapy.

Dr. Baron directed the UCSF Primary Care Internal Medicine Residency from 1989 until 2006, training over 200 residents for primary care and general internal medicine careers.  The program is widely believed to be one of the nation's top Primary Care Internal Medicine Residency Programs.  Dr. Baron is currently (and has been since 1999) Principal Investigator of UCSF’s HRSA training grant “Residency Training in General Internal Medicine.” In this role, he has designed and implemented nationally-recognized innovations in residency education and in resident and program evaluation and outcome assessment. Dr. Baron was also Principal Investigator of the Robert Wood Johnson-funded “Take Care to Learn/Partnerships in Quality Education” project. In this role, Dr. Baron designed, implemented and evaluated an innovative educational intervention to teach system-based care, quality improvement, and interdisciplinary care to medical residents, adult nurse practitioner students, and pharmacy students to improve outcomes in patients with diabetes. Dr. Baron also created and directed the UCSF General Internal Medicine Clinician Educator Fellowship Program until 2006.
 
In 2000, he became Associate Dean for Continuing Medical Education at UCSF and now leads UCSF's extensive CME program.  This includes more than 100 live courses attended by more than 15,000 health professionals, 50 accredited regularly scheduled conferences and grand rounds, all on-line CME activities, and all accredited enduring materials. UCSF's CME Program is accredited by the Accreditation Council for CME (ACCME), with exemplary citations. Dr. Baron also currently serves as President of the University of California CME Consortium. In 2006, Dr. Baron also assumed the role of Associate Dean for GME and Designated Institutional Official for UCSF. In this position he oversees UCSF’s 73 accredited residency and fellowship training programs, 60 non-ACGME fellowship programs and over 1300 trainees. The UCSF GME program has recently received a five year continued accreditation with recognition for innovations in evaluation of clinical competencies and for creative methods of communication with trainees. Dr. Baron also directs the UCSF Mini Medical School, a community-based education program on health and health care. The program featured a course on Obesity in the winter of 2005, chaired by Dr. Baron and co-sponsored by COAST.

Dr. Baron has received numerous teaching awards including University of California's "Distinguished Teacher Award" and the California Society of General Internal Medicine's "Clinician Teacher of the Year Award" and “Senior Clinician-Educator Mentorship Award.” He focuses much of his scholarship on obesity and related topics in nutrition, in preventive medicine topics including hypertension and lipid management, and in issues in graduate and continuing medical education.

Contact Information

University of California, San Francisco
500 Parnassus Avenue, Suite MUE 250
Campus Box 0474
San Francisco, CA 94143-0474

Ph: 415-476-3414
Fax: 415-502-4166
Email: baron@medicine.ucsf.edu