Epidemiology

Dr. David Vlahov

Dr. David Vlahov, PhD, Professor of Clinical Epidemiology, started a new position this week as the Dean of the University of California, San Francisco School of Nursing. As an epidemiologist, a nurse, and the first male dean of the school, he brings a unique background to the post.

Although he will have to scale down his many commitments in the epidemiology world, Dr. Vlahov will be promoting the discipline in his new role as nurses are on the front lines of public health initiatives.

"Nurses make great epidemiologists. Having attended births, visited homes, been at the bedside, seen and eased suffering, and comforted bereaved loved ones, nurses understand what is behind the binary code. They can visualize data in multiple dimensions," he says.

Dr. Vlahov further points to three decades of studies demonstrating the effectiveness of nurse practitioners in primary and chronic disease management, not to mention other areas of advanced practice. With 30 million new people expected to come into the health care system because of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the system will need well-trained nurses and nurse practitioners if it is able to meet the goal of "health for all," he says.

Dr. Vlahov has an accomplished background in urban epidemiology, not only here at the Mailman School of Public Health, but also as Senior Vice President for Research and Director of the Center for Urban Epidemiologic Studies at the New York Academy of Medicine, where he has led studies in Harlem and the Bronx on racial and ethnic disparities in health care treatment and how they can be addressed.

He earned his BS and MS in nursing from University of Maryland and a PhD in epidemiology from Johns Hopkins University. Much of his research has been devoted to the study of urban health issues, including HIV.

He remembers being a nurse in the mid-1980s, when the disease was thought to be only the province of white gay men, and watching as doctors puzzled over how a black female injection drug user could have contracted Pneumocystis carinii, a form of pneumonia that afflicts individuals with AIDS.

As a PhD student at Hopkins during a time when scientists were only beginning to realize that AIDS could become a major public health issue, he began studying HIV infection in injection drug users, setting up and upon graduation becoming Principal Investigator of ALIVE, a natural history study of street recruited out-of-treatment injection drug users in Baltimore.The study was instrumental in defining incidence and risk factors of HIV infection as well as the spectrum of disease, rate of progression to AIDS, and survival. It also helped encourage the Maryland State Legislature's passageof a law permitting needle exchange programs.

When he came to New York City, Dr. Vlahov assumed the position of Director of the Center for Urban Epidemiologic Studies, recently vacated by Dr. Ezra Susser. His work over the next ten years focused on HIV and hepatitis C infection among injection drug users, and an evaluation of the New York Expanded Syringe Access Program through pharmacies, a line of research expanded by Dr. Crystal Fuller.

With Dr. Sandro Galea, he led the Center's response to the events of September 11, 2001, conducting landmark population based assessments and follow-ups to understand the mental health of New York City residents after the terrorist attacks.

Dr. Vlahov will continue his active research career while he is Dean and also plans to continue as the editor of the Journal of Urban Health and to work with the International Society for Urban Health.

April 5, 2011