Ricardo Izurieta
Ricardo Izurieta, MD, DrPH, MPH, is a professor and the director of global communicable diseases at the College of Public Health and director of the Public Health Scholar Concentration, at Morsani College of Medicine, University of South Florida. Dr. Izurieta received his MD from the Central University of Ecuador and after graduation, carried out his postdoctoral training in public health and tropical infectious diseases at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, Emory University, Georgia, and Universidad Cayetano Heredia, Peru. In 1991, he faced the cholera epidemic that spread through Latin American countries as national director of the Cholera Control Program in the Ministry of Public Health of Ecuador. In 1997, he was appointed chief of the Department of Epidemiology and director of The Vaccine Center of the Armed Forces of Ecuador. During his studies, he has been a USAID Thomas Jefferson Fellow, a PAHO Research Fellow, an ORISE/CDC Fellow, a Gorgas Memorial Institute Fellow, and a FUNDACYT Fellow. In 2003, Dr. Izurieta was elected vice president of the Gorgas Memorial Institute of Tropical and Preventive Medicine and currently he is its Latin American liaison. He has been a panel reviewer for the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and National Science Foundation (NSF), Wellcome Foundation, and served on the ACAIM Taskforce on International Health Security, consultant for the United Nations Global Water Pathogens Project as well as for the United Kingdom and the Brazilian Academies of Sciences.