About

Philip Alcabes is Professor of Community Health at Hunter College, the City University of NY. He is director of the Bachelor’s of Science in Community Health program.

Alcabes studies the history, ethics, and policies of public health.  In addition to Dread: How Fear and Fantasy Have Fueled Epidemics from the Black Death to Avian Flu (2009), he has written essays on these topics for The American Scholar, Virginia Quarterly Review, and the Chronicle of Higher Education, as well as peer-reviewed journals.  In the 1980s and ’90s, he conducted epidemiologic research on AIDS and other community-acquired infections, social issues in the spread of epidemics, and methods for the statistical study of infectious diseases.

Outside the university, Alcabes was a member of the scientific advisory board of the World Trade Center Registry project in NYC, and has consulted on public-health policy and AIDS-prevention projects in Eastern Europe for the Open Society Institute’s International Harm Reduction Development Program, World AIDS Foundation, and Fogarty International Foundation of the National Institutes of Health.

Alcabes graduated from Union College and holds masters degrees in biochemistry (U. of California, Berkeley) and public health (Columbia University).  He earned a Ph.D. in infectious-disease epidemiology in 1993 from the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health. He lives in the Bronx, New York.

Click Alcabes CV to download Philip’s CV.