Burton Singer, PhD

Adjunct Professor
Emerging Pathogens Institute
University of Florida

Burton Singer is currently Adjunct Professor in the Emerging Pathogens Institute at University of Florida. On July 1, 2009, he retired from Princeton University where he had been Charles & Marie Robertson Professor of Public and International Affairs. He also had affiliated faculty appointments in the Programs in Applied & Computational Mathematics, Environmental Studies, African Studies and the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton. He was formerly chair of the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health and professor of economics and statistics at Yale University. He has served as chair of the National Research Council Committee on National Statistics and as chair of the Steering Committee for Social and Economic Research in the World Health Organization Tropical Disease Research (TDR)
program. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences (1994), the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies (2005) and was a Guggenheim fellow in 1981-1982.

He has centered his research in three principal areas: identification of social, biological, and environmental risks associated with vector-borne diseases in the tropics; integration of psychosocial and biological evidence to characterize pathways to alternative states of health; and health impact assessments associated with economic development projects. His research program has included studies of: the impact of migration and urbanization on malaria transmission in the western Amazon region of Brazil and in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania; the biological correlates of well-being and health consequences of gene-environment interactions focused on the social environment; and health impacts over time of large-scale development projects in the tropics, with particular emphasis on forcibly resettled communities. Since coming to the University of Florida, he has been involved in research focused on vector borne diseases of plants, with particular emphasis on huanglongbing (citrus greening), its transmission dynamics, and strategies for control. He has also reengaged with a longstanding mathematical interest; namely, combinatorial studies of randomness and degrees of irregularity.

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