David Vlahov, RN, PhD, FAAN

Dr. Vlahov is Professor Emeritus at the University of California, San Francisco School of Nursing after serving five years as Dean. He served on the faculty as Professor of Epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins and Columbia Universities, and was Adjunct Professor in Medical Schools at Cornell, Mount Sinai and New York University and the College of Nursing at New York University. He has also served as co-Director of the National Program Office(NPO) for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health and Society Scholars program and currently, the NPO for the Foundation's Evidence for Action program. He brings research expertise in urban health, epidemiology, infectious diseases, substance abuse and mental health. Dr. Vlahov conducted studies of urban populations in Baltimore for over 20 years including several longitudinal cohort studies for which he received the NIH MERIT Award. More recently, Dr. Vlahov led epidemiologic studies in Harlem and the Bronx, which have served as a platform for subsequent individual- and community-level intervention studies and community based participatory research (involving partnerships with residents, community based organizations, academic/ public health departments) to address social determinants of health. This work has contributed information on racial/ethnic disparities in health and approaches to address such disparities. Uniting these interests, Dr. Vlahov became Director of the Center for Urban Epidemiologic Studies at the New York Academy of Medicine He was a Visiting Professor at the Medical School in Belo Horizonte, Brazil to develop their programs in urban health, and has been an expert consultant to the WHO’s Urban Health Center in Kobe, Japan. He served on the New York City Board of Health during the Bloomberg administration. Dr. Vlahov is the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Urban Health, has edited three books on urban health and published over 650 scholarly papers. With colleagues he initiated the International Society for Urban Health (www.isuh.org), serving as its first President. He is a member of the National Academy of Medicine (formerly theInstitute of Medicine) and a Fellow of the American Academy of Nursing. He has served on the Board of Directors for the American Association of Colleges of Nursing and as a member on the National Advisory Council for Nursing Education and Practice at HRSA.