Donald S Burke

Professor Burke is now retired, holding the positions of Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of Health Science and Policy and Dean Emeritus of the School of Public Health at the University of Pittsburgh. He also served as the inaugural Jonas Salk Chair in Global Health, Director of the Center for Vaccine Research and Associate Vice Chancellor for Global Health.

Prior to becoming Dean at Pittsburgh, he was at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, where he was Professor of International Health, Director of the Center for Immunization Research, and won the Golden Apple award for best teacher. Before Johns Hopkins, Burke served for 23 years on active duty at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, where he directed vaccine and diagnostic research on global virus diseases of military importance, including dengue, encephalitis, hepatitis, influenza, and HIV, and emerging infections. He lived in Thailand for six years, worked extensively in Cameroon, and led cooperative research in India, China, South Africa. He has authored over 300 articles and has a citation index in the top 1% of all infectious disease experts world-wide. Through his analyses of patterns of emerging diseases, in 1997 Burke was the first person in the world to warn that coronaviruses posed a serious threat to human health. While Dean he led a multi-university NIH Center of Excellence for computational modeling and simulation of infectious disease epidemics and vaccines. Most recently he has made major contributions to the understanding of the epidemiology of drug overdoses in the U.S. 

Burke is Past-President of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. His awards include the John Snow Award for Epidemiology from the American Public Health Association, the Langmuir Lectureship of the American Epidemiological Society, the Thomas Francis Jr. Medal, and the Porter Prize in Public Health. Burke has served as an advisor to the WHO, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and the NIH, FDA, and CDC. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine. Burke co-founded and served as president of Epistemix, Inc., a start-up company that produces epidemic modeling software. 

Now officially retired, Burke remains engaged in his research collaborations in an advisory role, works with health non-profits, and writes scholarly and popular articles on the history of infectious diseases.