Alfred Sommer

Alfred (Al) Sommer is a prominent American ophthalmologist and epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. His research on vitamin A in the 1970s and 1980s revealed that dosing severely vitamin A deficient children with an inexpensive, large dose vitamin A capsule twice a year reduces child mortality by as much as 34 percent.^[1] The World Bank and, recently, the Copenhagen Consensus list vitamin A supplementation as one of the most cost-effective health interventions in the world.^[2][3]

Biography

Sommer was born in 1942 in New York City and graduated from Union College in Schenectady, New York in 1963. Sommer has an MD from Harvard Medical School (1967) and an MHS from the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health (1973). He is professor of Epidemiology and International Health at the Bloomberg School and Professor of Ophthalmology at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. He was dean of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health from 1990-2005,^[4] where he was instrumental in growing the student body and faculty, and raising funding for an unprecedented expansion of the School's research and size, including $130 million for the expansion and renovation of its facilities.^[5] During his tenure, the school was named #1 on the first U.S. News & World Report Graduate Schools of Public Health ranking, where it remains today.^[6]

Because of Sommer's vitamin A research, he has won the Albert Lasker Award for Clinical Medical Research in 1997,^[7] the Danone International Prize for Nutrition in 2001,^[8] and the Helen Keller Prize for Vision Research^[9] among other honors.^[4] The 2005 PBS documentary Rx for Survival featured Sommer as a "global health champion."^[10]

Sommer became chair of the Lasker Foundation's Board of Directors in 2008^[11] and serves on the board of Bloomberg Philanthropies.^[12] He is also director emeritus on the corporate Boards of Directors of Becton Dickinson and T. Rowe Price.^[13]

His current research involves the cause, magnitude, consequences, and control of vitamin A deficiency.

Sommer Scholars

In 2004, the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health established a $22 million scholarship program in honor of Dr. Sommer called the Sommer Scholars. ^[14] The programs aims to "recruit the next generation of public health leaders to devise new, effective interventions to improve global health."

References