Philip Landrigan, MD, MSc

Director, Global Public Health Program, Global Observatory on Pollution and Health, Boston College

Philip J. Landrigan, MD, MSc is a pediatrician and epidemiologist. He has served on the faculty of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai since 1985 and chaired the Department of Preventive Medicine from 1990-2015. Since 2010, he has been Dean for Global Health. He is Editor of the Annals of Global Health, and is the Director of Global Public Health Program and Global Observatory on Pollution and Health at Boston College. Landrigan is a graduate of Boston College, Harvard Medical School, and the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. He served for 15 years as an EIS officer and epidemiologist at CDC, including one year in Nigeria in the Global Campaign for Eradication of Smallpox and one year in El Salvador as advisor to the National Immunization Campaign. For another 9 years, he served in the US Navy. He is a member of the National Academy of Medicine. Environmental and occupational health is the focus of Landrigan’s work. He conducted studies of low-level lead poisoning that contributed to EPA’s 1976 decision to remove lead from gasoline – an action that reduced US children’s blood lead levels by 94%, raised population mean IQ, and has been emulated in more than 150 countries. He chaired a National Academy of Sciences Committee on Pesticides and Children that documented children’s extraordinary vulnerability to pesticide chemicals and forced revision of US pesticide law to include protections for children’s health. To address the rapidly growing but neglected problem of hazardous environmental exposures in low- and middle-income countries, Landrigan has since 2015 co-chaired the Lancet Global Commission on Pollution & Health.