Lucey

 

 

 

 

 

Daniel R. Lucey, D’77, MED’81/’82
Career Achievement

Clinical Professor of Medicine, Geisel School of Medicine and The Dartmouth Institute

 

 

 

Dr. Daniel R. Lucey has spent 40 years fighting epidemics through patient care, research, education, and public health policy. This work began in 1982 with AIDS in San Francisco, before HIV was discovered, and overseas every year from 2003 to 2020 with SARS, MERS, avian and pandemic flu, Ebola (with Doctors without Borders), Zika, yellow fever, chikungunya, plague (with the World Health Organization), and COVID-19.

With this experience, Dr. Lucey proposed an exhibit on viral epidemics in 2014 to the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. With over 40 U.S., international, and Smithsonian colleagues, he helped create the content for the exhibit. Titled “Outbreak: Epidemics in a Connected World,” this exhibit had 3.3 million visitors from 2018 to 2022. A traveling version has been translated into 10 languages and shown in 55 countries. 

Dr. Lucey has written over 100 publications in New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, Journal of Infectious Diseases, Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and others, as well as 20 book chapters. He has delivered 525 presentations in the U.S. and internationally, as well as 110 interviews in respected news outlets.

Dr. Lucey served as infectious diseases chief of the 900-bed Washington Hospital Center, responding to the 9/11 and the anthrax attacks. He was an infectious diseases attending physician at the National Institutes of Health, the president of the Greater Washington Infectious Diseases Society, an infectious diseases consultant to the U.S. Congress attending physician from 2006 to 2021, and author of 160 blogs for the Infectious Diseases Society of America since the COVID-19 pandemic began.

Dan received the Young Investigator Award from the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene in 1988, the Louis Weinstein award for the best paper in 1992 in Clinical Infectious Diseases, the Walter Reed Medal for Anthrax Response in 2001, and was on a WHO roster of experts from 2008 to 2016. Dan taught at Georgetown from 2001 to 2022. 

Dan is a clinical professor of medicine at Geisel School of Medicine and at The Dartmouth Institute. He teaches two courses on epidemics and serves on the board of the Center for Global Health Equity. In 2016, he proposed the Geisel Alumni Wisdom Book, now with 180 stories, that is given to students on Graduation Day.

Graduating from Dartmouth College in 1977, Dan backpacked across Europe, took a boat from Istanbul across the Black Sea, hitchhiked into Iran, and traveled by bus across Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India. He was admitted early to the class of 1981, worked twice at Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital in Soweto, South Africa, and graduated Alpha Omega Alpha. He completed his residency at the University of California, San Francisco in 1985, and his infectious diseases fellowship and MPH at Harvard in 1988.

 

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