Anthony Viera received his medical degree from the Medical University of South Carolina and his Master of Public Health from the Gillings School of Global Public Health at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He completed his family medicine residency in the United States Navy and served as a family physician for eight years on active duty prior to a two-year fellowship as a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar at UNC. Before being named Chair of the Department of Community and Family Medicine at Duke University School of Medicine, Dr. Viera was a faculty member in the UNC School of Medicine and UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health from 2006-2017. He continues as an Adjunct Professor of Epidemiology and Adjunct Professor of Public Health Leadership at UNC.

At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he served as Associate Director for the MD-MPH program for two years, then as Director for five years. Under his leadership, the program maintained substantial growth, with nearly 25% of medical students pursuing the additional degree. In 2014, the Program received the Outstanding Educational Program Award from the Association for Prevention Teaching and Research. He also secured HRSA funding to add two courses to the Program and created the Primary Care and Population Health Scholars Program.

An established researcher, Anthony has had continuous NIH finding as a Principal Investigator since 2009. In 2012, he created the UNC Hypertension Research Program, and his research teams’ total grant funding to date from NIH has amounted to $16,220,686. For the past two decades, Dr. Viera has been conducting research on hypertension with a focus on blood pressure monitoring, and he has earned national and international reputation for this work. He was certified as a clinical hypertension specialist by the American Society of Hypertension and is recognized as a Fellow of the American Heart Association. He has been called to serve on NIH study sections and as a regular reviewer for the American Heart Association. In addition to his hypertension research, Anthony has also received NIH funding from the National Cancer Institute for his obesity prevention work. He is currently the co-PI on an R38 residency research training grant as well as PI on a PCORI contract to improve hypertension control across Duke Health.

As an educator and mentor, Anthony has received over 20 awards including a university wide Distinguished Teaching Award. In addition to serving on six dissertation committees, he has mentored 5 K-award scholars and numerous students, residents and junior faculty on publications and research projects. His paper on the kappa statistic has been cited over 10,000 times.

He served as editor-in-chief of the Journal of Family Practice and was editor of a leading textbook of family medicine. In addition, he created CrossWards, a set of books that use crossword puzzles to review USMLE Step 1 and Step 2 content. He co-edited a textbook on college health as well as two editions of a textbook on leadership and management for medical faculty, which also has been translated to Japanese. He continues an active primary care practice seeing patients at the Duke Family Medicine Clinic.