Editor of Nation's Premier Public Health Journal to Speak on History of Public Health

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Dr. Alfredo Morabia

Dr. Alfredo Morabia, editor for The American Journal of Public Health since 2015, will speak on "The Public Health Approach: Population Thinking from the Black Death to COVID-19" at 6 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 17, in Giffels Auditorium in Old Main.

Morabia earned his B.A. in Greek and Latin in 1971 at College Calvin in Geneva, going on to get an M.D. from the School of Medicine at the University Hospital in Geneva in 1978. After receiving a grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation, he completed an M.P.H. and Ph.D. in epidemiology and an M.H.S. in biostatistics at Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health.

In 1990, he took on the chair of the Clinical Epidemiology Unit at the University Hospital in Geneva. He was appointed Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in Edinburgh in 2009 and now serves as a professor of clinical epidemiology at the Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University, New York, and a professor of epidemiology at the Barry Commoner Center for Health and the Environment at Queens College, City University of New York.

He has produced research in epidemiology and studies of cardiovascular diseases among the people who cleaned up the debris at the World Trade Center after 9/11. He is also a scholar of the history of tobacco and the history of public health. He formerly served as the editor of "Epidemiology in History" at the American Journal of Epidemiology.

Morabia's talk, based on his book by the same name, is being sponsored by the U of A Humanities Center and the Medical Humanities RSO in the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences, along with the Center for Public Health and Technology in the College of Education and Health Professions.

Copies of Morabia's book are available. For more information, contact tstarks@uark.edu.