Bio
Dr. Martin I. Meltzer is retired, having served at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (1995-2025), as a senior health economist, Senior Advisor and a Distinguished Consultant in the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases (NCEZID/CDC) in Atlanta, GA. He received his undergraduate degree from the University of Zimbabwe in 1982, and a Masters and Doctorate in Applied Economics from Cornell University, NY, in 1987 and 1990, respectively. From 1990 to mid-1995, he was on the faculty at the College of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Florida. In 1995, he moved to CDC, where he was in the first class of Prevention Effectiveness (health economists) Fellows. He led the modeling teams supporting CDC’s response to the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic. Other responses in which he led modeling activities included estimating the residual risk associated with the 2012 contaminated steroid injectable products that caused fungal meningitis among patients, Ebola outbreaks in West Africa (2014-16) and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (2018-19), the Zika epidemic, the COVID Response, the 2022 Ebola outbreak in Uganda, and the 2022 Mpox epidemic. Examples of his research include estimating the impact of the 2009 influenza pandemic, the modeling of potential responses to smallpox as a bioterrorist weapon and assessing the economics of controlling diseases such as rabies, dengue, hepatitis A, meningitis, Lyme, and malaria. Dr. Meltzer has over 300 publications in peer-reviewed journals, book chapters, conference proceedings and patents, and more than 60 software tools. These tools include FluAid, FluSurge and FluWorkLoss, COVIDSurge, COVIDTracer and COVIDTracer Advanced. Collectively, these tools have been downloaded more than 250,000 times and have been used by local, state, national and international public health agencies, with jurisdictions exceeding a total of 1 billion people. He also, in 2022, led the team that developed the COVID Quarantine and Isolation Calculator, which has had approximately 14 million unique visitors. He is an associate editor for both Emerging Infectious Diseases and Public Health Reports. I have also supervised more than 40 doctoral and post-doctoral health economists.