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Professor of Public Health, Adelphi University

Philip Alcabes is Professor in the Department of Allied Health at the School of Nursing, Adelphi University, in Garden City, NY.

Alcabes studies the history, ethics and policy of public health. In addition to Dread: How Fear and Fantasy Have Fueled Epidemics from the Black Death to Avian Flu (2009), he has written essays on these topics for The American Scholar, Virginia Quarterly Review, and the Chronicle of Higher Education, as well as peer-reviewed journals. In the 1980s and ’90s, he conducted epidemiologic research on AIDS and other community-acquired infections, social issues in the spread of epidemics, and methods for the statistical study of infectious diseases.

Outside the university, Alcabes has consulted on public health policy and AIDS-prevention projects in Eastern Europe for the Open Society Institute’s International Harm Reduction Development Program, World AIDS Foundation, and Fogarty International Foundation of the National Institutes of Health.

Alcabes graduated from Union College and holds masters degrees in biochemistry (U. of California, Berkeley) and public health (Columbia University). He earned a Ph.D. in infectious disease epidemiology in 1993 from the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health. He lives in the Bronx, New York.

Experience

  • 2012–present
    Professor, Adelphi University

Education

  • 1993 
    Johns Hopkins University, PhD
  • 1981 
    Columbia University, MPH
  • 1978 
    U. of California, Berkeley, MA

Publications

  • 2009
    Dread: How Fear and Fantasy Have Fueled Epidemics from the Black Death to Avian Flu, Public Affairs Books