George W. Rutherford, M.D., A.M.

Board Member

George is a Professor of Epidemiology, Preventive Medicine, Pediatrics, and History; Head of the Division of Infectious Disease and Global Epidemiology in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics in the School of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and Professor of Epidemiology and Health Administration in the School of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the Director of the Center for Global Strategic Information and Public Health Practice within UCSF’s Institute for Global Health Sciences and is the Principal Investigator of a series of CDC cooperative agreements that support PEPFAR in the Caribbean Region, Botswana, Ghana, Haiti, Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Tanzania, Uganda, Ukraine, Vietnam, and Zambia. He teaches HIV surveillance and research methods at UCSF and through the WHO Collaborating Centre for HIV Strategic Information at the University of Zagreb, Croatia.

Educated at Stanford University and Duke University School of Medicine, he is board certified in pediatrics, general preventive medicine, and public health. He has worked extensively in public health, with an emphasis on the epidemiology and control of communicable diseases, both domestically and internationally, and has held several positions in public health agencies, including having served as State Health Officer and State Epidemiologist for California, Director of the AIDS Office for the San Francisco Department of Public Health, Director of Immunizations for the New York City Department of Health and an Epidemic Intelligence Service Officer at CDC. He has been in academic medicine and public health since 1995, where his interests have largely focused on the epidemiology and control of infectious diseases of public health importance, and more specifically on HIV infection and other emerging diseases in low- and middle-income countries. He has a special interest in meta-analysis and serves as an editor in the Cochrane Collaboration’s Infectious Diseases Group. In addition to his CDC projects, he serves as an advisor to the World Health Organization, the Joint United Nations Program on HIV and AIDS, and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria. He is a past chair of the American Academy of Pediatrics Section on Epidemiology and was the first Chair of the Department of Veterans Affairs Research Advisory Council. He has also served on the National Academy of Medicine’s Board on the Health of Select Populations and multiple National Academy of Medicine committees and panels dealing with HIV, tropical diseases, injuries, and diseases in military and veteran populations.

Dr. Rutherford has been broadly involved in the public health response to SARS-CoV-2 since the earliest days of the pandemic.