Robert Dubrow
Robert Dubrow, MD, PhD, professor emeritus and senior research scientist, was heavily involved in the educational mission of Yale School of Public Health, teaching Principles of Epidemiology I for nine years and Principles of Epidemiology II for four years, serving as the school’s inaugural associate dean for academic affairs from 2007 to 2010 and winning the school’s Distinguished Teaching Award in 2002, 2007, and 2012.
Dr. Dubrow’s academic discipline is epidemiology. For much of his career, his research focused on cancer, HIV, and their interaction. However, in 2015, moved by what he sees as the greatest public health challenge in this century, Dr. Dubrow committed himself to a new direction in the field of climate change and health, and became founding faculty director for an initiative that grew into the Yale Center on Climate Change and Health (YCCCH), for which he served as faculty director through June 2024 and now serves as co-faculty director. YCCCH utilizes research, education, public health practice, and policy engagement to help safeguard the health of human populations from adverse impacts of climate change and from human activities that cause climate change. It works with academic, government, and civil society partners and aims to make local, national, and global impact and to integrate social justice into all of its work.
Dr. Dubrow’s research now focuses on adverse health effects of heat and air pollution. In addition, he is a collaborator on a project that aims to establish an early warning system for dengue in the Mekong Delta Region of Vietnam and in a partnership between YCCCH and the Connecticut Department of Public Health, funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, to build the capacity of local health departments to address the adverse health effects of heat and air pollution. He also has interests in the benefits and harms of air conditioning, in climate change and health in the Caribbean, and in health equity issues as they relate to climate change. He is a co-author of the 2019 to 2024 annual reports of The Lancet’s Countdown on Health and Climate Change.