Perry Smith

Dr. Smith is Professor Emeritus at the School of Public Health. His primary public health interests are infectious disease epidemiology and public health surveillance. He served as the State Epidemiologist of New York and Director of the Division of Epidemiology at the New York State Department of Health from 1996 to 2010. Prior to 1996, he directed the Health Department’s Bureau of HIV/AIDS Epidemiology.  He has been a national leader in public health surveillance through his work with the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists (CSTE), where he has served as president, secretary-treasurer, and member of the executive committee. He has also chaired various CSTE sub-committees, including the CSTE Public Health Informatics Team, focusing on electronic national disease and laboratory reporting and establishing national reporting standards. In addition to teaching epidemiology courses at the School, he has worked with young epidemiologists from Eastern Europe and collaborated on epidemiologic studies in the Czech Republic and Poland. Following his retirement from the State Health Department in 2010, he has continued as a faculty member of the School of Public Health, mentoring students and serving on the MPH Steering Committee, and as a public health epidemiology consultant on national issues. He is board certified in Internal Medicine and trained in CDC’s Epidemiology Intelligence Service and Preventive Medicine Residency.

Research Interests

• AIDS/HIV epidemiology 
• AIDS case surveillance 
• HIV seroprevalence and seroincidence studies 
• health care worker HIV transmission