Dr. Talan received his medical degree from the University of Illinois Medical College in Chicago. He completed his residencies in Internal and Emergency Medicine and fellowship in Infectious Diseases at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and its associated medical centers. He is board certified in Internal Medicine, Emergency Medicine, and Infectious Diseases. He is Professor of Emergency Medicine and Medicine/Infectious Diseases in Residence (Emeritus) at The David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.

From 1993 to 2014, Dr. Talan was Chairman of the Olive View-UCLA Department of Emergency Medicine. He is currently faculty of the Department of Emergency Medicine at UCLA Ronald Reagan Medical Center. He is a Fellow of the American College of Emergency Physicians and the Infectious Diseases Society of America. Dr. Talan serves on the editorial board of the Annals of Emergency Medicine and is a reviewer for many journals including the New England Journal of Medicine and JAMA.

Dr. Talan is considered an authority in the area of acute infections that result in severe morbidity and death. His research focuses on emergency department-based surveillance and epidemiological research of emerging infections and clinical investigations of acute infectious diseases. Dr. Talan was the first formally trained and board-certified specialist in emergency medicine and infectious diseases. Through the course of his career, he has advanced patient care at this intersection through utilization of emergency departments (EDs) to improve surveillance and conduct clinical research of novel diagnostic and therapeutic approaches. He has directed many multi-center ED-based surveillance projects and RCTs. In 1995, he established EMERGEncy ID NET, an ED-based sentinel network for research of emerging infections in the United States funded by CDC. This collaborative network of emergency and public health researchers has been funded for 28 years and has made many important observations including the seminal report on the emergence of community-associated methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (N Engl J Med 2006). He has led multi-center ED-based RCTs including trials demonstrating the efficacy of short-course antibiotic treatment of acute pyelonephritis (JAMA 2000), efficacy of adjunctive antibiotics for surgically-drained skin abscesses (N Engl J Med 2016), and the largest trial to date of nonoperative treatment of appendicitis (N Engl J Med 2020). Recently, he directed a multi-center ED surveillance project that determined the attributable risk of ED healthcare personnel contracting COVID-19 through direct patient care during 2020 (PLoS One 2022) and contributed to one of the first post-pharma COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness studies (N Engl J Med 2021). Dr. Talan has been invited to lecture nationally and internationally on infectious disease emergencies and emergency department surveillance and research.