March 7, 2002
WHO leader to speak Tuesday
Dr. David Heymann, executive director of the World Health Organization’s Communicable Diseases Cluster, will be on campus March 11 and 12 and will present Public Health Grand Rounds Tuesday afternoon. He will speak on “The Microbial Threat in Uncertain Times,” from 1:30 to 3:30 p.m. in room T-439 of the Health Sciences Center. The presentation is free and open to everyone. Heymann joined the World Health Organization in 1989 after working for 13 years as a medical epidemiologist in sub-Saharan Africa on assignment from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He participated in investigating the first outbreak of Ebola in 1976 and the second outbreak the next year. Early in his career, he spent two years in India as a medical officer in the smallpox eradication effort. In recent years at the World Health Organization, Heymann has been chief of research for the Global Program on AIDS and director of the Program on Emerging and Other Communicable Diseases Surveillance and Control. He took up his current position as executive director of the Communicable Diseases Cluster in 1998. Heymann graduated from Pennsylvania State University and earned an M.D. from Wake Forest University. He also holds a diploma from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and completed epidemiology training in the two-year Epidemic Intelligence Service training program of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control.
