Dr. John Michael Taormina (he/him/his) is a board-certified family medicine physician who is joining us from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He completed his medical degree at the University of Pittsburgh and his residency training at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) St. Margaret hospital. He is passionate about prevention of excessive weight gain, interventions to promote safe and medically-appropriate weight loss, and management of medical problems associated with excess weight.

He began his interest in obesity prevention in 2018 as a student intern of the Epidemiology Elective Program at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). During this time, he worked on a project in the Obesity Prevention and Control branch of the CDC evaluating key components of clinical-community linkages to promote healthy behaviors in racial and ethnic minority children. He continued that work during residency as the lead investigator of his family health center’s Childhood Obesity in Primary Care quality improvement project, hosted through the American Academy of Pediatrics. This role provided invaluable experience designing and evaluating clinic workflow to facilitate discussions about healthy behaviors and weight during well-child visits. He completed an area of concentration in obesity medicine during his residency training and provided comprehensive weight management services to a cohort of patients in his primary care office throughout his final year of training. He is excited to complete his fellowship training in obesity medicine at the University of Colorado to further develop his skills in encouraging behavior change, expand his knowledge of and experience with weight loss medications, and to foster collaboration with other specialists to provide the best care for patients.

As a family physician, Dr. Taormina cares for patients of all ages, racial and ethnic groups, sexual orientations, and gender identities. His clinical and research interests are in developing public health interventions to prevent and manage obesity; investigating effective weight management strategies in adolescents with obesity using family-centered interventions, weight loss medications, and bariatric surgery; and developing culturally sensitive, comprehensive, and effective strategies for weight management for transgender and gender-diverse individuals with overweight and obesity. He collaborates with the lifestyle medicine clinics at the University of Colorado Children’s Hospital and sees adult patients through the Anschutz Health and Wellness Center, Rocky Mountain Regional VA Medical Center and through collaboration with the UCHealth Integrated Transgender Program.

In his free time, you can find him perusing local farmer’s markets, cooking, watching musical theatre at DPAC, hiking with his partner, or bouncing around the Denver and Aurora areas eating ethnic food.