Robert Breiman

Dr. Robert F. Breiman is Professor of Global Health, Environmental Health, and Infectious Diseases at Emory’s Rollins School of Public Health and School of Medicine.  Dr Breiman's primary areas of research have been related to addressing inequities with focus on child mortality, urbanization in impoverished settings, and a range of respiratory and enteric diseases, as well as a variety of emerging infectious diseases. In addition to his research, he is currently working on translating global health work to increase public awareness and engagement. He is PI of the CDC-funded project on SARS-CoV vaccine messaging, called COVID Vaccines Information Equity and Demand creation (COVIED) with partners at Emory, Johns Hopkins University, Morehouse School of Medicine, Georgia College--Rural Studies Institute, the National Association of Community Health Centers (NACHC), the Black Cross and Riwi.   He is co-PI of the NIH-funded Centers for Research on Emerging Infectious Diseases in East and Central Africa (CREID-ECA) in collaboration with Washington State University, RTI, KEMRI and others.   He is PI of a new grant funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to support Typhoid Fever burden of disease studies and policies, working with WHO, IVI, Sabin Vaccine Institute, Christian Medical College in Vellore.   

Until 2020, he was the Executive Director and Principal Investigator for the Child Health and Mortality Prevention Surveillance (CHAMPS) network and the Director of the Emory Global Health Institute. CHAMPS, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF), is designed to characterize and provide crucial data for preventing childhood mortality in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia; it currently works in S Africa, Mozambique, Kenya, Ethiopia, Mali, Sierra Leone, Bangladesh and India.  He has also been PI of BMGF and Gavi-funded projects focused on typhoid surveillance, rotavirus immunization impact, and characterizing the evolution of pneumococcal genetics globally during the era of pneumococcal conjugate vaccine use.  Before joining Emory in 2013, Dr. Breiman worked at CDC for 26 years.  From 2004-2013, he was based in Nairobi, Kenya as the Director of CDC-Kenya’s Global Disease Detection Division, and for three years as overall Director of CDC-Kenya.  Breiman was Head, of the Programme on Infectious Diseases and Vaccine Sciences at the internationally acclaimed International Center for Diarrheal Disease Research in Dhaka, Bangladesh (ICDDR,B) from 2000-2004. He was Director of the United States National Vaccine Program Office (NVPO)  from 1995-2000 and was the Chief of the Epidemiology Section of the Respiratory Diseases Branch (RDB) from 1989-1997.  He served in the Epidemic Intelligence Service at CDC from 1987-1989 in RDB.  Dr Breiman was elected into the National Academy of Medicine in 2017 and is a Fellow of the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) and the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene (ASTMH).