About

Dr. Asher’s clinical interests include endovascular infections, viral hepatitis, and HIV. She is interested in caring for infectious diseases in persons with substance use disorders. Her research is broadly focused on the intersection of infectious diseases and substance use disorders, and how to improve the care of patients hospitalized with severe, injection drug-related infections. She utilizes large datasets to study outcomes following invasive infections – such as infective endocarditis and bone, joint, and spine infections – affecting people who inject drugs, in both North Carolina and the US. Additionally, through qualitative methods, her team examines how to identify and develop patient-centered approaches to disease prevention, inpatient addiction care and harm reduction, and long-term antibiotic delivery. She is also interested in Hepatitis C epidemiology, HIV health services research, and clinical practice issues related to outpatient parenteral antimicrobial therapy (OPAT), as well as clinical quality improvement activities in these spheres. She benefits from a wide array of collaborators, including public health professionals, cardiac surgeons, addiction medicine specialists, epidemiologists, and health behavior researchers.

In the news

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  Study Shows Drug Use-Associated Endocarditis Increases Hospital Risk For Bacterial Infections

  David Rosen, PhD, MD, and Asher Schranz, MD, MPH, members of the Institute for Global Health and Infectious Diseases, found people with drug use-associated infective endocarditis are at high risk of mortality and future hospitalization for bacterial infections, including endocarditis, skin and soft tissue infections and bacteremia. The study, a collaboration with the North Carolina … Read more

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  IGHID Investigators Discuss Projects As New Academic Year Begins

  Global health research is a collaborative process, and each researcher at the Institute for Global Health & Infectious Diseases contributes a piece to solving the puzzle of disease and morbidity. With a new academic year underway, read what some of our investigators are working on to improve the health of global populations. Their multi-disciplinary findings will be … Read more

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  Schranz receives NIH grant to study patient care for drug-use related heart infections

  Asher Schranz, MD, MPH, assistant professor of medicine in the division of infectious diseases, has received a grant from the NIH National Institute on Drug Abuse for the project “Drug-use associated infective endocarditis: Post-hospitalization outcomes and patient treatment preferences.” Schranz’s research is broadly focused on the intersection of infectious diseases and substance use disorders. He … Read more

Education