Biography of David Bloom

In January 2003 he was appointed Chairman of the School's Department of Population and International Health.

Bloom received a B.S. in Industrial and Labor Relations from Cornell University in 1976, an M.A. in Economics from Princeton University in 1978, and a Ph.D. in Economics and Demography from Princeton in 1981. Prior to joining the public health school faculty in 1996, Bloom served on the public policy faculty at Carnegie-Mellon University, and on the economics faculties at Harvard University and Columbia University.

From 1996 to 1999 Bloom served as Deputy Director of the Harvard Institute for International Development. From 1987 to 1996 he was Professor of Economics at Columbia University where he served as Chairman of the Department of Economics from 1990 to 1993. Bloom has worked extensively in the areas of labor, population, and health and has been retained as a consultant to various public and private organizations, both within the United States and abroad. He has taught numerous courses on labor economics, development economics, global health and population, and statistics and econometrics at both the graduate and undergraduate levels. He has also published more than one hundred fifty articles, book chapters, and books.

Bloom has extensive field experience throughout the developing world, including work in Indonesia, China, India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, South Africa, Jamaica, and El Salvador. Bloom has served as a member of the Book Review Board and the Board of Reviewing Editors of Science magazine, Associate Editor for the Review of Economics and Statistics, and Contributing Editor for American Demographics. In addition, he has received various honors and awards for his research and teaching, including a Sloan Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, and a Visiting Scholar appointment at the Russell Sage Foundation.

Bloom is currently serving as a member of the Board of Directors of the American Foundation for AIDS Research (amfAR). Bloom is a coauthor (with Henry Rosovsky) of Higher Education in Developing Countries: Peril and Promise. He is also co-director (with Joel Cohen) of an American Academy of Arts and Sciences project on universal basic and secondary education.