Dr. M. Daniele Fallin, the James W. Curran Dean of Public Health at the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University, will join us as a plenary speaker during our 94th GPHA Annual Meeting and Conference on Jekyll Island.

With more than 250 scientific publications that have been cited more than 22,000 times, Fallin’s globally-recognized research focuses on applying genetic epidemiology methods to studies of neuropsychiatric disorders including autism, Alzheimer’s disease, schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder and to developing applications and methods for genetic and epigenetic epidemiology, as applied to mental health and development.

Fallin has led multiple CDC- and NIH-funded projects regarding how environments, behaviors, genetic variation, and epigenetic variation contribute to risk for psychiatric disease, particularly autism. She led the Maryland site of the Study to Explore Early Development (SEED) and of the Early Autism Risk Longitudinal Investigation (EARLI) for over a decade. She was also the inaugural principal investigator of the B’more Healthy Brain and Child Development (HBCD) study, one of 25 sites of the NIH’s newly initiated HBCD study, where she currently serves as an associate director of the administrative core to guide epidemiologic design. Given her commitment to public mental health broadly, Dean Fallin also co-led the Maryland POE Center for Workplace Mental Health and continues to be engaged in workplace and school-based mental health as key tools for promoting population mental health.

Prior to joining Rollins, Fallin worked at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health for 22 years, where she served as chair of the Department of Mental Health, Sylvia and Harold Halpert Professor, Bloomberg Centennial Professor, and held joint appointments in the Bloomberg School’s Departments of Epidemiology and Biostatistics and the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine’s Departments of Medicine and Psychiatry. While at the Bloomberg School, Fallin directed the Wendy Klag Center for Autism and Developmental Disabilities and previously served as director of the genetic epidemiology area within epidemiology prior to becoming chair of the Department of Mental Health in 2013.

Fallin completed a Bachelor of Science e from the University of Florida–Gainesville and earned a PhD in genetic epidemiology from Case Western Reserve University.