Peter Scal, MD, MPH is Associate Professor in the Division of General Pediatrics and Adolescent Health and Core Faculty at the Center for Interprofessional Health.
For more than twenty-five years his research has asked a single question in different forms: what accounts for the difference between two young people with the same diagnosis and the same disease severity whose lives go very differently? His work has examined adolescents and young adults living with arthritis, epilepsy, diabetes, and physical disabilities, and has consistently found that the psychological conditions of care — whether young people are managing their condition for reasons that feel like their own, whether they feel capable of it, and whether they feel supported — predict quality of life and wellbeing more strongly than clinical measures of disease do.
He has led federally funded studies as principal investigator for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, including studies of young people with epilepsy and of youth with mobility limitations, and holds a Mentored Clinical Scientist Award from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. His work on the transition from pediatric to adult care informed national policy. He has led AHRQ evidence reviews on health care transition and on the care of adults with Down syndrome, and contributes adolescent health measurement to the NIH-funded PLUS research consortium. He was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholar and serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Adolescent Health.
Dr. Scal practices adolescent and young adult medicine at the Hubert H. Humphrey Job Corps Center in St. Paul, where he serves as Medical Director, and at Leap Pediatrics.
