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.  In 2022, he began serving as the Founding Director of the Infectious Diseases and Oncology Research Institute (IDORI) at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa.   He stepped down from that role in 2025 and became the senior scientific advisor for IDORI. 

He was 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.   Until June 2025, he was 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; his focus in CREID has been on research, capacity building and mentoring in Uganda.   He is PI of a grant funded by the Gates Foundation to support Typhoid Fever burden of disease studies and policies, working with the International Vaccine Institute and a variety of partners including scientists in Ghana, Madagascar, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Burkina Faso, and Nigeria.   

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 Founding Director of CDC's International Emerging Infections Program in Kenya and subsequently CDC-Kenya’s Global Disease Detection Division, as well as serving for three years as overall Director of CDC-Kenya. He assisted in the founding and implementing of Kenya's Field Epidemiology and Laboratory Training Program (FELTP) which has been an immense success, mentoring, training and advancing the careers of hundreds of Kenyans, including many public health leaders in Kenya and elsewhere in sub-Saharan Africa.

Breiman was Founding Head, of the Programme on Infectious Diseases and Vaccine Sciences (PIDVS) at the internationally acclaimed International Center for Diarrheal Disease Research (icddr,b) in Dhaka, Bangladesh from 2000-2004; PIDVS transitioned in recent years to the Division of Infectious Diseases at icddr,b). He was Director of the United States National Vaccine Program Office (NVPO)  from 1995-2000, overseeing vaccine activities for all USG agencies and serving as the secretariat for the National Vaccine Advisory Committee (NVAC). He 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).