Frank J. Palella Jr., M.D. is a professor of medicine at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and an attending physician at Northwestern Memorial Hospital.

Dr. Palella's research focuses on the natural history, clinical outcomes, responses to therapy and complications of HIV disease. He wrote a landmark article documenting dramatic reductions in AIDS-associated deaths and opportunistic disease as a consequence of highly active antiretroviral therapy use. The article is the most cited in HIV/AIDS literature.

He currently serves as the principal investigator or co-investigator of six studies, many funded by the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Palella has been on Northwestern's faculty in the division of infectious diseases since 1992. He is a Northwestern alumnus, having completed his undergraduate degree, residency in internal medicine and fellowship in infectious diseases at Northwestern.