Senior Fellows

Stanley O. Foster, MD, MPH

Dr. Foster in Professor of Global Health at Emory's Rollins School of Public Health. After graduating from Williams College (1955) and the University of Rochester School of Medicine (1960), he spent two years as a CDC Epidemic Intelligence(EIS) Officer assigned to the Indian Health Service in Arizona. In addition to his primary responsibility of examining 10,000 school children per year for trachoma (25% were positive), he had the opportunity to investigate other health emergencies as they arose: plague, rabies, measles, shigella, food poisoning, keratoconjuntivitis (Philadelphia, Talequah Oklahoma, and La Paz Bolivia), and rotavirus in the Truck Islands in the South Pacific.  In 1966, he was invited to join CDCs new Smallpox Eradication Program.  He and his family spent four years in Nigeria (1966-1970) and four years in Bangladesh (1972-1976) working with national health workers to eradicate smallpox.  In 1977, he spent three months living with nomads in Somalia (the last smallpox epidemic country in the world.)

From 1980 to 1994, Dr. Foster worked with the International Health Program Office at CDC in its Combatting Childhood Communicable Disease Project (CCCD). He worked with 12 African countries to improve the health and survival of children under five by strengthening their capacity to prevent and treat diseases.  Dr. Foster focused on prevention (immunization, malaria chemoprphylaxis of women); case management of the three priority killers of children (malaria, pneumonia, and diarrhea) and in strengthening their preventive and curative systems.

Dr. Foster has been been teaching Global Health at the Rollins School of Public Health since 1994.   

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