William Barsan, MD

Dr. William Barsan is Professor and Chair Emeritus of the Department of Emergency Medicine at the University of Michigan Medical School. He came to the University of Michigan in 1992, as the Section Chief for Emergency Medicine within the Department of Surgery. Prior to joining the UM, he was faculty at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine. While in Cincinnati, Dr. Barsan was a founding member of the Greater Cincinnati Northern Kentucky Stroke Team and has been involved in stroke clinical trials since 1983. He led the development of an Emergency Medicine Residency at the University of Michigan and spear-headed the creation of the Department of Emergency Medicine within the medical school in 1999. He has served as president of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine and the Association for Academic Chairs of Emergency Medicine. Dr. Barsan served 8 years on the Board of the American Board of Emergency Medicine (ABEM) and was president of ABEM from 1999-2000. He was elected to membership in the National Academy of Medicine in 2003.

His academic focus has been translational research in neurological emergencies and emergency care. From 2006-2019, he was the principal investigator for the Neurologic Emergency Treatment Trials (NETT) Network Clinical Coordinating Center funded by the NINDS. In this role he was responsible for all aspects of the development, design, and conduct of multicenter clinical trials in the NETT. Since 2006, the NETT completed seven large randomized clinical trials, RAMPART, ALIAS2, POINT, SHINE, ATACH2, ProTECT and ESETT. From 2010-2013, he was the co-principal investigator on a cooperative award funded by the NIH Common Fund and FDA titled “Accelerating Drug and Device Evaluation through Innovative Clinical Trial Design” (ADAPT-IT). As part of this grant, Dr. Barsan led the team that developed Bayesian adaptive clinical trials and used mixed methods analysis to evaluate the barriers to adoption and acceptance of these novel clinical trial designs from FDA, NIH, Study Sections, Statisticians and Clinical Trialists. Since 2017, Dr. Barsan has been principle Investigator for the Strategies to Innovate Emergency Care Clinical Trials Network (SIREN) Clinical Coordinating Center funded by NINDS and NHLBI. The SIREN network seeks to improve the outcomes of patients with neurologic, cardiac, respiratory, hematologic and trauma emergencies by identifying effective treatments administered in the earliest stages of care. SIREN is currently conducting 4 large multicenter clinical trials, of which Dr. Barsan is PI for 2 traumatic brain injury trials, BOOST3 and HOBIT.