David Gittelman

David Gittelman joined the University at Albany's College of Integrated Health Sciences in 2020 as a Clinical Associate Professor in the Health Policy, Management & Behavior Department and as an affiliated faculty member with and advisor to the Center for Global Health.  He has over three decades of broad global public health program experience, largely in Sub-Saharan Africa.  As a public health advisor with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) from 1986 to 2018, Mr. Gittelman contributed program planning, policy development, management and evaluation skills to further a wide range of global health interventions, with a focus on malaria prevention and control and childhood immunizations.  He served as the first CDC deputy team lead for the U.S. President's Malaria Initiative (PMI) from 2006-2018, in an interagency collaboration with USAID.  Starting with a small team supporting three African countries, he helped expand CDC-PMI operations and guide the technical contributions of over 50 US- and field-based epidemiologists and program officers who strengthened national malaria control programs in 26 countries of Sub-Saharan Africa and the Greater Mekong Sub-region.  In parallel, Mr. Gittelman helped establish the Alliance of Malaria Prevention (AMP) partnership to promotion the large-scale ownership and use of long-lasting insecticide-treated nets through campaign and routine channels, and remains a member of its core leadership group.

Prior to his work with PMI, Mr. Gittelman served as a regional team leader for measles control programs with CDC's Global Immunization Division.  He developed expertise in program monitoring and evaluation for measles and polio vaccination campaigns in Africa, South Asia, Central Asia and Eastern Europe.  Other CDC assignments included establishing a program on reproductive health services in refugee settings, coordinating a public health assistance program to the Newly Independent States of the former Soviet Union, establishing the first CDC technical assistance program in post-apartheid South Africa, and working over four years in Lesotho for the CDC-USAID Combatting Childhood Communicable Disease Projects (CCCD) in immunizations, diarrheal diseases control, and the control of acute respiratory infections in children.

Mr. Gittelman volunteered in the Peace Corps as a regional immunization program supervisor in the Democratic Republic of Congo.  He is currently vice-president of the Returned Peace Corps Volunteers of Northeast New York.

Research Interests

• Monitoring and evaluation of malaria prevention and control programs
• Effectiveness of global health campaigns
• Integration of Priority global health interventions delivered through campaigns and routine services

Current Major Activities

• Consultant-advisor to the International Federation of the Red Cross Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) and Alliance of Malaria Prevention (AMP) in Geneva on mass campaigns to distribute insecticide-treated nets (ITNs) in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, and on a new Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation grant to improve mass ITN campaigns.
• Consultant/SME to the Health Campaign Effectiveness Coalition and the Campaign Integration Working Group hosted by the Task Force for Global Health in Atlanta and funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Affiliations

• Councilor, Committee on Global Health, American Society for Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, term 2019-2021.

Sample of recently completed studies

Gittelman, D. "Revisiting the integration of distribution of insecticide-treated nets with other health interventions through mass campaigns," prepared for the Global Fund for HIV, TB and Malaria, June 2018 (in review).