David Van Sickle BA, MA, PhD

David is the co-founder and CEO of Propeller, a Madision, WI based company developing tools to improve the management of asthma and COPD, and lower the costs of care. He received his PhD in medical anthropology from the University of Arizona in 2004. His dissertation research, funded by the National Science Foundation, examined the rising prevalence of asthma and allergy in India, a topic that he previously studied among Native Americans in Alaska, Arizona and New Mexico. From 2006 to 2009, he was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health and Society Scholar at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.

Between 2004-6, he was an Epidemic Intelligence Service officer at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, assigned to the Air Pollution and Respiratory Health Branch. During this time, he provided epidemiological support to the National Asthma Control Program, and investigated the health effects of a variety of environmental exposures. In addition, he helped establish emergency illness and injury surveillance in coastal Mississippi after Hurricane Katrina.