Don Francis | |
---|---|
Born |
Bay Area |
October 24, 1942
Fields | Epidemiology |
Institutions |
CDC Genentech, Inc. VaxGen Global Solutions for Infectious Diseases |
Donald Pinkston Francis (born October 24, 1942) is an American epidemiologist who worked on the Ebola outbreak in Africa in the late 1970s, and HIV/AIDS researcher. He retired from the U.S. Public Health Service in 1992, after 21 years of service. He currently lives in San Francisco, California.
Francis was born October 24, 1942 in the Bay Area of California and grew up in Marin County. His main interest was skiing, and his mother, father and grandfather were physicians. However, he was a poor student as a child, suffering from dyslexia. Francis has said that he gravitated towards science because he had such difficulty with subjects where fluid reading ability was needed.
Francis completed his undergraduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was a member of the California chapter at Delta Upsilon, class of 1966. He received his M.D. from Northwestern University and his Doctor of Science in Virology from Harvard. An infectious diseases fellowship at Harvard followed his internship and residency in pediatrics at the University of California Medical Center in Los Angeles. Francis helped eradicate smallpox from Sudan, India and Bangladesh before working on AIDS. He worked on the cholera epidemic in Nigeria in the early 1970s, the smallpox epidemic in Yugoslavia in 1972, and the 1976 Ebola epidemic in Sudan. In addition, Francis was an early developer of the hepatitis B vaccine in the United States and China.