Dr. Robert Breiman is the Interim Director of the new Infectious Diseases and Oncology Research Institute (IDORI) at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) in Johannesburg, South Africa.  Before joining Wits, Rob was the Director of the Emory University Global Health Institute and he was the overall PI for the Child Health and Mortality Prevention Surveillance (CHAMPS) network, which is providing an array of new insights on targetable causes of neonatal, infant and child deaths in sub-Saharan Africa and south Asia. He is co-PI for an NIH funded Center for Research on Emerging Infectious Diseases in East and Central Africa (CREID-ECA) and is the PI for the BMGF-funded Scientific Advisory Process for Optimal Research on Typhoid fever disease burden (SAPORT). 

Prof Breiman was at the US CDC for 26 years (until 2013), where he focused on pneumonia, diarrheal disease, immunizations, emerging infections and urbanization. His time at CDC included 13 years outside of the US, including 4 years based in Dhaka, Bangladesh (where he was the Founding Head of the Program on Infectious Diseases and Vaccine Sciences at ICDDR,B) from 2000-4, and 9 years in Kenya (with the Kenya Medical Research Institute/CDC), including serving as Country Director (2010-3) and the Founding Director of the International Emerging Infections Program/Global Disease Detection Division in Kenya.  He was elected to the US National Academy of Medicine (2017) and the American Epidemiology Society (1996).  He is a Fellow of the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA), as well as of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene (ASTMH).  According to Google Scholar, Prof Breiman’s publications have >65,000 citations with an h-factor of 127.