Since September 2001, America's public health infrastructure has received more attention than at any time since the polio vaccination campaigns of the 1950s. David Rosner, Ph.D., M.P.H. and co-principal investigator Gerald Markowitz, Ph.D. address the effects on the field of public health of new mandates and resources aimed at protecting Americans from bioterrorism. Their project, The Un-Natural History of Public Health, takes a fresh look at the history of public health and examines the U.S. experience with crises, disease, and mortality from the 1900s to the present. The investigators will consider the physical, political, and social changes that have affected the American experience of illness and death and the structure of public health services. Their work will provide a broad historical perspective and new insights for future public health policymaking.

In addition to numerous grants, he has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow and a Josiah Macy Fellow. Presently, he is the recipient of an Investigator Award and a grant from the Milbank Memorial Fund. He has been awarded the Distinguished Scholar's Prize from the City University, the Viseltear Prize for Outstanding Work in the History of Public Health from the APHA and the Distinguished Alumnus Award from the University of Massachusetts. He is author of A Once Charitable Enterprise (1982, 1987), and editor of Hives of Sickness: Epidemics and Public Health in New York City (1995) and Health Care in America: Essays in Social History (with Susan Reverby). In addition, he has co-authored and edited with Gerald Markowitz numerous books and articles, including Deadly Dust: Silicosis and the Politics of Occupational Disease in Twentieth Century America (1991, 1994, new edition: 2005); Children, Race, and Power: Kenneth and Mamie Clark's Northside Center (1996, 2000); Dying for Work (1987); and Slaves of the Depression: Workers' Letters About Life on the Job (1987).