H. Jack Geiger

H. JACK GEIGER, M.D., M. Sci. Hyg. (EPIDEMIOLOGY), Sc.D. (hon). is the Arthur C. Logan Professor Emeritus of Community Medicine at the City University of New York Medical School and Visiting Professor of Epidemiology at the Columbia-Mailman School of Public Health.

He received his M.D. degree from Western Reserve University School of Medicine in 1958 and trained in internal medicine on the Harvard Service of Boston City Hospital from 1958-64. During this period he also earned a degree in epidemiology from the Harvard School of Public Health, was a research fellow at the Channing and Thorndike Laboratories, Harvard Medical School, and Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Joint training Program in Social Science and Medicine, Harvard University. Before assuming the Logan Professorship at CUNY Medical School in 1978, he was Chairman of the Department of Community Medicine at Tufts University Medical School(1968-71), Visiting Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School (1972-3), and Chairman of the Department of Community Medicine, SUNY Medical School at Stonybrook (1973-78). In 1983-84 he was Senior Fellow in Health Policy at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, California.

Most of his professional career has been devoted to the problems of health, poverty and human rights. He initiated the community health center model in the U.S., combining community-oriented primary care, public health interventions, civil rights and community development initiatives, and was a leader in the development of the national health center network of more than 900 urban, rural and migrant centers currently serving some 14 million low-income patients. From 1965-72 he was Director of the first urban and first rural health centers in the U.S., at Columbia Point, Boston and Mound Bayou, Mississippi.He was an author of numerous early studies of the impact and effectiveness of community health centers.

In 1993 he was elected to Senior Membership in the Institute of Medicine, and in 1998 he received the IOM's Gustav O. Lienhard Award for "contributions to the advancement of minority health" and the American Public Health Association's Sedgwick Memorial Medal for Distinguished Service in Public Health.

His research interests in recent years have focused on the problem of racial and ethnic disparities in medical care. He was the author of a commissioned paper, reviewing the evidence of such disparities in six major disease categories, for the Institute of Medicine's report on "Unequal Treatment," and has compiled an annotated bibliography of more than 600 peer- reviewed studies on this topic for the Physicians for Human Rights report on "The Right to Equal Treatment."

Dr. Geiger is a founding member and past president of Physicians for Social Responsibility, which shared in the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985, and a founding member and past president of Physicians for Human Rights, which shared in the Nobel Peace Prize in 1998.

Last Updated: 06/12/05 by Cal and Vic