Class Of 2004

PHS Alum Eric Ding, ScD, JHU Class of 2004, has been busy in recent years as an epidemiologist, health economist and public health advocate. He is also Chair of the New England Complex Systems Institute’s Department of Public Health and a former faculty member/scientist at Harvard.

As a childhood survivor and cancer prevention advocate, he was called one of the ‘Facebook Philanthropists‘ when founding the 6 million member online Campaign for Cancer Prevention, featured in Newsweek in 2007. He was recognized by NY Magazine as one of the first to alert the world of the pandemic risk of COVID-19 in Jan 2020. His team also developed the first digital mobile contract tracing app in 2014, that helped give rise to modern tracing apps during COVID pandemic. His published papers have been highlighted cited and he has advised many local, state, & federal government leaders in Congress, White House, prime ministers, and many international organizations, and served on UN & WHO’s COVID19 Mortality Committee.

As a Public Health Studies student at JHU in the early 2000’s from 2001-2004, Dr. Feigl-Ding saw the program grow from its early beginnings to becoming the largest major in Arts & Sciences.  He became the youngest to complete double doctoral programs from the Harvard School of Public Health at age 23, which he says was made possible by his accelerated public health training at Hopkins. Dr. Feigl-Ding recently shared with us that the former PHS Director, Jim Goodyear, was a “key inspirational mentor and the instrumental person in pushing [him] to pursue public health.”  Another piece of PHS history is that Dr. Feigl Ding co-founded and helped launch the student-run journal, Epidemic Proportions (EP), now celebrating it’s 20th year. Jim Goodyear even credits Eric for coming up with EP’s name!