Margaret Hamburg, one of the youngest people ever elected to the Institute of Medicine , is an expert in community health and bio-defense, including preparedness for nuclear, biological, and chemical threats. As health commissioner for New York City , she developed innovative programs for controlling the spread of tuberculosis and AIDS.
Background
Born in Chicago to two distinguished physicians. Her mother was the first black woman to attend Vassar College and the first to earn a medical degree from Yale. Her father served as president of the Institute of Medicine from 1975-1980.
Dr. Hamburg is married to Peter Fitzhugh Brown, an artificial intelligence expert, and the couple have two children.Her children are among the few to have their mother's name listed twice on their birth certificates — once as their mother, and once as New York's health commissioner.
Education
When she was inducted into the prestigious Institute of Medicine in 1994, she had followed the path of her parents, both IoM members since the 1970s. "There was a sense of real fun that the father-mother-daughter constellation had been formed," said Hamburg.
She earned her M.D. from Harvard Medical School, and completed her training at the New York Hospital/Cornell University Medical Center. She did research in neuroscience at Rockefeller University in New York from 1985 to1986 and in neuropharmacology (the study of the action of drugs on the nervous system) at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland.
Career
In 1990, she left the NIH to serve as deputy health commissioner for New York City. Within a year, she was promoted to health commissioner. It was a difficult and demanding job, with severe budget constraints and many responsibilities. She strove to improve health services for women and children, instituted programs to combat HIV infection, and initiated the nation's first public-health bio-terrorism defense program. During her term as health commissioner, she also held academic positions at Columbia University School of Public Health and Cornell University Medical College, both in New York City.
While commissioner Dr. Hamburg's innovative treatment plan for tuberculosis (TB) became a model for health departments around the world. In the 1990s, TB was the leading infectious killer of youths and adults and had become resistant to standard drugs. To be effective, new drugs required patients to take pills every day for up to two years, but failure to complete the full course of treatment allowed the bacteria to mutate into drug-resistant strains. Hamburg sent healthcare workers to patients' homes to help manage their drug regimen, and between 1992 and 1997, the TB rate for New York City fell by 46 percent, and by 86 percent for the most resistant strains.
Since 2001, she has been vice president for biological programs at the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a foundation dedicated to reducing the threat to public safety from nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. She is a leading advocate for changes in the nation's public health policies and infrastructure, to meet the challenges presented by modern bioterrorism. She is a distinguished senior fellow with the Center for Strategic and International Studies.