Alexander Tatara, M.D., PhD., is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Internal Medicine at UT Southwestern and a member of its Division of Infectious Diseases and Geographic Medicine. He also has a secondary appointment as Assistant Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering. His clinical interests include preventing and treating musculoskeletal infections. Certified by the American Board of Internal Medicine in Internal Medicine and Infectious Diseases, he joined the UT Southwestern Faculty in 2024.

Originally from Illinois, Dr. Tatara holds a bachelor’s degree in biomedical engineering from Washington University in St. Louis. He received his Ph.D. in bioengineering at Rice University in Houston and his medical degree from Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. He completed internal medicine residency training at Massachusetts General Hospital and infectious diseases fellowship training at Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. He completed his post-doctoral fellowship training at the Harvard University Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering and the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

Dr. Tatara’s research interests include the design of new biomaterials, tissue engineering strategies, mechanisms of pathogen virulence, and immunoengineering to prevent and treat infection. To date, his work has resulted in 41 peer-reviewed publications, five book chapters, and one patent. He is the head of an NIH-funded research program to study the interface of biomaterials, infective organisms, and host immunology. He is also the author of the clinical textbook "The Infectious Diseases Consult Handbook," published by Springer Nature (2023). He has been recognized with numerous national and international awards, including the Young Investigator Award from the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine (2016), Milton Huppert Graduate Student Award from the Medical Mycological Society of the Americas (2016), Outstanding Research Award by the Society for Biomaterials (2019), and the Maxwell Finland Research Award from the Massachusetts Infectious Diseases Society (2022). He is an NIH NIAID K08 reciepient (2024-2029).