David Vlahov, PhD, RN, FAAN

About

Dr. Vlahov is Professor at the Yale School of Nursing and Professor of Epidemiology- Microbial Diseases at the Yale School of Public Health. Prior to this, Dr. Vlahov served as Dean and Professor at the University of California, San Francisco School of Nursing and earlier was Senior Vice President for Research, Director of the Center for Urban Epidemiologic Studies at the New York Academy of Medicine. He was the Co-Director of the National Program Office for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Culture of Health: Evidence for Action Program. Prior to that he was Co-Director of the National Program Office for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Health and Society Scholars’ Program. He came to New York from Baltimore where he was a Professor on the Epidemiology faculty and vice-chair of epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

His primary area of focus has been on urban health, infectious diseases, substance use and mental health. Across these faculty appointments, he led the ALIVE study in Baltimore that recruited and followed 3,000 persons who inject drugs to study the natural and then the treated history of HIV infection. Analyses from the study provided key information for HIV prevention and treatment; for this NIH recognized his worked with a prestigious MERIT Award. His work was influential in providing empirical evidence to pass harm reduction legislation. His studies in Baltimore, Harlem and the Bronx have served as a platform for subsequent individual, community and policy level intervention studies and advocacy. He has led community based participatory research to address social determinants of health. This work has contributed new knowledge to promote health equity.

Dr. Vlahov was the founding President of the International Society for Urban Health (www.isuh.org ), hosting International Conferences. He has been a Visiting Professor at the Medical School in Belo Horizonte, Brazil to develop their programs in urban health, and served an expert consultant to the WHO’s Urban Health Center in Kobe, Japan.

Dr. Vlahov is the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Urban Health, has edited four books on urban health. He has published over 700 scholarly papers.

He served on the New York City Board of Health, the NIH National Advisory Council on Drug Abuse, the NIH Advisory Board for the Office of AIDS Research, the Board of Directors for the American Association of Colleges of Nursing, and HRSA’s National Advisory Board on Nursing Education and Practice. He is currently on the Strategic Planning Workgroup for the National Institute of Nursing Research.

In 2011, Dr. Vlahov was both elected to the National Academy of Medicine and served on six panels and their Board of Global Health. In 2015, he was inducted into the Johns Hopkins University Society of Scholars. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Nursing and the New York Academy of Medicine. In 2019, he was elected to the Sigma Theta Tau International Nursing Researcher Hall of Fame. In 2023, he gave the Raymond Pearl Memorial Lecture for the Human Biology Association and in 2024, gave the Harry Feldman Memorial Lecture for the American Epidemiological Society.