Dr. Barry R Bloom
Co-chair Harvard School of Public Health
Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor and Joan L. and Julius H. Jacobson Professor of Public Health
A leading scientist in the areas of infectious diseases, vaccines, and global health and former consultant to the White House, Dr. Barry Bloom continues to pursue an active interest in bench science as the principal investigator of a laboratory researching the immune response to tuberculosis, a disease that claims more than two million lives each year.
He has been extensively involved with the World Health Organization (WHO) for more than 40 years. He is currently Chair of the Technical and Research Advisory Committee to the Global Programme on Malaria at WHO and has been a member of the WHO Advisory Committee on Health Research and chaired the WHO Committees on Leprosy Research and Tuberculosis Research, and the Scientific and Technical Advisory Committee of the UNDP/World Bank/WHO Special Programme for Research and Training in Tropical Diseases. Dr. Bloom serves on the editorial board of the Bulletin of the World Health Organization.
Dr. Bloom currently serves on the Ellison Medical Foundation Scientific Advisory Board and the Wellcome Trust Pathogens, Immunology and Population Health Strategy Committee. He is on the Scientific Advisory Board of the Earth Institute at Columbia University and the Advisory Council of the Paul G. Rogers Society for Global Health Research.
His past service includes membership on the National Advisory Council of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the Scientific Advisory Board of the National Center for Infectious Diseases of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the National Advisory Board of the Fogarty International Center at the National Institutes of Health, as well as the Governing Board of the Institute of Medicine.
Dr. Bloom was the founding chair of the board of trustees for the International Vaccine Institute in South Korea, which is devoted to promoting vaccine development for children in the developing world. He has chaired the Vaccine Advisory Committee of UNAIDS, where he played a critical role in the debate surrounding the ethics of AIDS vaccine trials. He was also a member of the US AIDS Research Committee.
Dr. Bloom came to HSPH to serve as Dean of the Faculty in 1998. He stepped down December 31, 2008 and is currently a Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor at HSPH. In his capacity as Dean, he served as Secretary Treasurer for the Association of Schools of Public Health (ASPH). Prior to that he served as chairman of the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine from 1978 to 1990, the year in which he became an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, where he also served on the National Advisory Board. In 1978, he was a consultant to the White House on international health policy.
Dr. Bloom holds a bachelor’s degree in biology and an honorary D.Sc. from Amherst College and a Ph.D. in immunology from Rockefeller University.
He is a past president of the American Association of Immunologists and the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology. He received the first Bristol-Myers Squibb Award for Distinguished Research in Infectious Diseases, shared the Novartis Award in Immunology in 1998, and was the recipient of the Robert Koch Gold Medal for lifetime research in infectious diseases in 1999.
Dr. Bloom is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, Institutes of Medicine, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Philosophical Society.