About
Michael Osterholm
Director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy and professor, School of Public Health, University of Minnesota, USA, and associate director of the Department of Homeland Security's National Center for Food Protection and Defense
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Michael Osterholm has been an international leader on issues related to bioterrorism and public health preparedness. He is a frequently invited guest lecturer on the topic of epidemiology of infectious diseases, calling attention to the need for community preparedness for a coming influenza pandemic and voicing the growing concern regarding the use of biological agents as catastrophic weapons targeting civilian populations.
A graduate of Luther College (B.A., 1975), Osterholm earned graduate degrees in environmental health (M.S., 1976) and epidemiology (M.P.H., 1978) at the University of Minnesota, where he was also was awarded a Ph.D. in environmental health in 1980. He served in various roles at the Minnesota Department of Health for 24 years (1975-1999), the last 15 as state epidemiologist and chief of the Acute Disease Epidemiology Section, before returning to the University of Minnesota to teach in its School of Public Health and head the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP). From 2001 through early 2005, in addition to his role at CIDRAP, he served as special adviser to Tommy Thompson, then Secretary of Health and Human Services, on public health preparedness issues including bioterrorism. In 2005 Osterholm was appointed by Michael Leavitt, the current Secretary of HHW, to the newly established National Science Advisory Board on Biosecurity.
Osterholm is the author or co-author of more than 300 papers and abstracts, including 20 book chapters, and is co-author of Living Terrors: What America Needs to Know to Survive the Coming Bioterrorist Catastrophe (2001). He is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences.