David Holtgrave, a nationally recognized leader in HIV
prevention and social science, will chair the new
Department of Health, Behavior and Society at the Johns
Hopkins Bloomberg School
of Public Health.
Established in May 2003 with a $20 million gift from a
donor who wished to remain unnamed, the department is
unique in its approach to identifying, understanding and
preventing the human behaviors that are the root cause of
nearly half of all illness and premature deaths in the
United States.
The new department will focus on research to test ways
to improve healthy behaviors and will concentrate
especially on how multilevel interventions from national
legislation to individualized behavioral counseling
education work together to improve health. For example,
smoking was dramatically reduced in the United States when
education programs were combined with higher taxes on
cigarettes and regulations restricting smoking in public
buildings.
The new department will draw upon the Bloomberg
School's strengths in the social and behavioral sciences,
communications, marketing, economics and other core public
health tools to establish a multidisciplinary research
program of health-related behaviors, develop health
interventions and create graduate programs to train new
leaders in the field.
"David Holtgrave brings a wealth of scholarly and
practical experience. He has an outstanding reputation for
working collegially to develop a forward-looking vision and
collectively marshaling the resources to drive it to
fruition," said Alfred Sommer, dean of the Bloomberg
School.
Holtgrave comes to Johns Hopkins from the Rollins
School of Public Health at Emory University, where he is a
professor and vice chair of the Department of Behavioral
Sciences and Health Education and professor of health
policy and management. He also serves there as director of
the Behavioral and Social Science Core of the Center for
AIDS Research. In 2005, the School of Public Health named
him Professor of the Year.
Prior to joining the faculty at Emory, Holtgrave from
1997 to 2001 oversaw HIV/AIDS services in the United States
as director of the Division of HIV/AIDS Prevention:
Intervention Research and Support in the National Center
for HIV, STD and TB Prevention at the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention. From 1991 to 1995, he worked at the
CDC developing HIV prevention programs and researching the
effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of a variety of HIV
prevention interventions. Holtgrave also served as
associate professor and associate director at the Center
for AIDS Intervention Research at the Medical College of
Wisconsin. He worked extensively on HIV prevention
community planning and served as a member of the Wisconsin
HIV Prevention Community Planning group. He is the author
or co-author of 150 professional publications.
Holtgrave received his doctoral degree in quantitative
psychology in 1988 from the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign and completed a postdoctoral research
fellowship at Harvard University.
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