Areas of interest

HIV and urban poverty, global health, homelessness

Education

• MSc, Kings College London
• MD, Johns Hopkins University
• MPH, University of California, Berkeley

Biography

David Bangsberg, MSc, MD, MPH completed his Masters Degree in Philosophy of Science from Kings College London and his MD at Johns Hopkins. He completed his medical residency at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in north Harlem to care for patients afflicted by urban poverty and HIV. Upon moving to the University of California, San Francisco and completing fellowships in infectious disease and AIDS prevention as well as Master's Degree in Public Health from the University of California, Berkeley, he became the leading expert in HIV and homelessness. He then turned to sub-Saharan Africa to find that the poorest HIV-infected people in the world had some of the highest levels of HIV treatment adherence. His work was described by President Bill Clinton as the “nail in the coffin” on the debate as to whether HIV-infected people in sub-Saharan Africa would adhere to antiretroviral medications. This finding neutralized the major criticism to providing multinational funding for global HIV treatment.

As former Director of Massachusetts General Hospital Global Health, he brought together the expertise of Harvard and MIT to improve physical, mental, social and economic health to the poorest regions of the world in several signature areas, including: HIV care, disaster response, cancer care, and medical technology innovation. He received the Clifford Barger Mentoring Award, given annually to 5 of the 12,000 Harvard Medical School faculty.

Before coming to SFU, he was the Founding Dean of the OHSU-PSU School of Public Health in his hometown of Portland, Oregon before serving as Provost and Dean of the College of Health Sciences at VinUniveristy in Hanoi, Vietnam.

He has published over 500 manuscripts with over 61,000 citations. He is also a member of the Association of American Physicians.