Barry R. Bloom is the Dean of the Faculty and the Joan L. and Julius H. Jacobson Professor of Public Health at the Harvard School of Public Heath. A leader in international 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 people each year.
Dr. Bloom has been extensively involved with the World Health Organization (WHO) for more than 30 years. He is a member of the WHO Advisory Committee on Health Research and has 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 currently serves on the US AIDS Vaccine Research Committee, 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. He also chairs 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.
In the past, he has advised the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) and chaired the Vaccine Advisory Committee of UNAIDS, where he played a critical role in the debate surrounding the ethics of AIDS vaccine trials. He also has served 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; and the Governing Board of the Institute of Medicine.
Dr. Bloom came to HSPH in 1998 from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, where he served as chairman of the Department of Microbiology and Immunology from 1978 to 1990, the year in which he became an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. In 1978, he was a consultant to the White House on international health policy.
Dr. Bloom holds a bachelor's degree in biology from Amherst College and a doctoral degree 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.