Background
Dr. Randall Packard is the William H. Welch Professor of the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. His research interests include the social history of disease, health and healing in Africa, and the history of public health and colonial and post-colonial medicine.
Dr. Packard serves as the chair of the History of Medicine department at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. He also has appointments in the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences and Department of International Health.
His research focuses on the global history of dengue fever. His research examines the emergence and global spread of dengue, with special attention to the complex set of biological, environmental, social and economic conditions that facilitated its rapid global expansion during the last decades of the 20th century. It also explores efforts to understand and control the disease.
He received his undergraduate degree from Wesleyan University in Connecticut and earned her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin. Prior to joining Johns Hopkins, Dr. Packard was the Asa Griggs Candler Professor of African History at Emory University, and Professor of International Health at the Rollins School of Public Health.
Dr. Packard is author of The Making of a Tropical Disease: A Short History of Malaria (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007) and editor of the Bulletin of the History of Medicine, a leading journal in its field on the social, cultural, and scientific aspects of the history of medicine worldwide.