Posted by: Andrew Lavelle; 28 March 2016; 6:32 pm
Robyn Gershon is a Professor, Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics and Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies at the School of Medicine, University of California, San Francisco. She has a joint appointment at University of California, Berkeley, where she currently teaches two disaster courses, one on Public Health Disaster Preparedness and Response and the other on Global Disasters. She is currently developing a third course on Hospital Disaster Preparedness. She received her doctoral training from Johns Hopkins University, School of Public Health, where she was on faculty for several years. Prior to her doctoral studies, she served as the Director of the Department of Biological Safety at Yale University. Dr. Gershon is a Professor Emerita from Columbia University, the Mailman School of Public Health, having spent more than a decade there as a research faculty member.
Dr. Gershon is an occupational and environmental heath interdisciplinary research scientist, with a focus on public health disasters. She has conducted more than one dozen large scale disaster studies in the past decade. Her work has focused on barriers and facilitators to disaster preparedness– especially with respect to vulnerable populations and essential workers- including the health care and public health workforce. Dr. Gershon’s research is designed to inform policy and practice, as exemplified by her landmark “World Trade Center Evacuation Study,” which helped lead to the first changes in the New York City high rise fire safety codes in more than 30 years. Her most recent study, “Mass Fatality Preparedness in the US,” is the first national study on the operational capabilities and readiness for the management of mass fatalities within the US. Dr. Gershon has published more than 100 peer review articles on her research.