Allen A. Herman

Biography

Dr. Allen Herman is an epidemiologist and public health physician. He was the founding Dean of the National School of Public Health, Medical University of Southern Africa of the Republic of South Africa. He graduated in Medicine from the University of Natal in 1977 and completed his doctoral work in Epidemiology at the University of the Witwatersrand in 1989. He was a postdoctoral fellow in Epidemiology at Columbia University in New York in 1986 and a member of the faculty from 1987 to 1988. From 1989 to 1997 he was a Visiting Scientist at the National Institutes of Health. He was an Adjunct Professor at the George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services from 1997 to 2004. Dr. Herman has extensive experience in developing and managing epidemiologic and public health research projects, and he is adept at secondary data analysis. In 1990 he helped develop the Baltimore Project, an Infant Mortality Reduction Initiative in Baltimore, Maryland. This community-based, model enriched prenatal care demonstration project for East Baltimore formed part of the basis for a $160 million dollar federally funded national program to reduce infant mortality. In 1992 he developed the scientific basis of the National Institutes of Health - District of Columbia Infant Mortality Reduction Initiative. He was the scientific director of this $25 million community-based U.S. federal research project that was designed to identify the critical factors that contribute to a high infant mortality among poor inner city African Americans and to develop interventions to reduce infant mortality rates. In 1990 he was a member of the steering committee of a consortium of research programs for maternally-linked data from: the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the University of Oxford, the Australian Institute of Child Health, the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics, and the University of Bergen, Norway. Maternally-linked data were created for several million births by linking birth data of siblings from the same mother into sibships. In the absence of national identification numbers that would allow deterministic linkage of birth records, Dr. Herman and his colleagues developed probabilistic linkage algorithms to create sibships for the states of Georgia, Washington, Missouri, and Utah. The work of the consortium culminated in an International Symposium on Maternally Linked Pregnancy Outcomes held in September 1995 in Atlanta, GA and a special issue of the journal Paediatric and Perinatal Epidemiology edited by Melissa Adams of the CDC, Allen Herman, and Francis Notzen of the National Center for Health Statistics. From 2008 to 2013 Dr. Herman worked in Tennessee and Mississippi developing and implementing community oriented primary care based diabetes self management education (DSME) programs. He worked with federally qualified health centers (FQHCs) and private sector primary care providers to DSME to underserved communities in western Tennessee and Mississippi. These were among the initial Every One with Diabetes Counts programs of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and established the effectiveness of group based DSME interventions for Medicare beneficiaries.

Research Interest

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