Stephen S. Morse PhD

Stephen S. Morse, Ph.D. is Director of the Center for Public Health Preparedness. Professional interests include epidemiology of emerging infections (a concept he originated), international cooperation for infectious disease surveillance, and defense against bioterrorism.

Dr. Morse recently returned to Columbia from 4 years in government service as Program Manager at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Department of Defense, where he co-directed the Pathogen Countermeasures program and subsequently directed the Advanced Diagnostics program. Before coming to Columbia, he was Assistant Professor (Virology) at The Rockefeller University in New York, where he remains an adjunct faculty member. His book Emerging Viruses was selected by "American Scientist" for its list of "100 Top Science Books of the 20th Century."

He currently serves as a Section Editor of the CDC journal "Emerging Infectious Diseases" and was formerly an Editor-in-Chief of the Pasteur Institute's journal "Research in Virology". He is a Fellow of the New York Academy of Sciences and a past Chair of its Microbiology Section. He was the founding Chair of ProMED (the nonprofit international Program to Monitor Emerging Diseases) and was one of the originators of ProMED-mail, an international network inaugurated by ProMED in 1994 for outbreak reporting and disease monitoring using the Internet.