David Vlahov, RN, PhD, FAAN

Associate Dean of Research, Yale School of Nursing
Community Health Systems

Dr. Vlahov is Professor Emeritus and past Dean at the University of California, San Francisco School of Nursing. As Dean, he provided support for the development of the MS-HAIL program as the first on-line graduate program at UCSF. Dr. Vlahov has extensive experience in interprofessional and interdisciplinary education and research and has served as Professor of Epidemiology at Johns Hopkins and Columbia Universities with adjunct appointments in medical schools at Cornell, Mount Sinai, New York University and the College of Nursing at New York University. He has also served as co-Director of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health and Society Scholars program. He brings research expertise in epidemiology, infectious diseases, substance abuse and mental health. Dr. Vlahov conducted studies of urban populations in Baltimore for over 20 years including several longitudinal cohort studies for which he received the NIH MERIT Award.

More recently, Dr. Vlahov led epidemiologic studies in Harlem and the Bronx, which have served as a platform for subsequent individual- and community-level intervention studies and community based participatory research (involving partnerships with residents, community based organizations, and academic/public health departments) to address social determinants of health. This work has contributed information on racial/ethnic disparities in health and approaches to address such disparities. Uniting these interests, Dr. Vlahov initiated the International Society for Urban Health (www.isuh.org), serving as its first President. He was a Visiting Professor at the Medical School in Belo Horizonte, Brazil to develop their programs in urban health, and was an expert consultant to the WHO’s Urban Health Center in Kobe, Japan. He served on the New York City Board of Health. Dr. Vlahov is the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Urban Health, has edited three books on urban health and published over 610 scholarly papers.