Dr. Duane Gubler is an Emeritus Professor and Founding Director of the Emerging Infectious Diseases (EID) Signature Research Programme at Duke-NUS Medical School, Singapore. As founding director, Prof Gubler led the establishment of the EID Programme in 2007 and to institutionalise and advance on the lessons learned from Singapore’s experience with SARS in 2003 and H1N1 influenza in 2009.Thanks to this effort, Singapore’s response to COVID-19 has been lauded by many around the world for the country’s high level of readiness and efficiency.
Prof Gubler has spent his career working on insect-borne infectious diseases, in particular dengue and dengue hemorrhagic fever. He has lived in tropical countries for 26 years and has extensive field experience in Asia, the Pacific and Caribbean islands, Central and South America and Africa. Gubler has published more than 350 papers on every aspect of dengue and other vector-borne diseases and has served as a consultant to the World Health Organization and countless other agencies. He was instrumental in developing the Pediatric Dengue Vaccine Initiative.
A graduate of The Johns Hopkins University School of Hygiene and Public Health, Prof Gubler founded the Dengue Branch of the National Center for Infectious Diseases, at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and served as Chief for nine years, and as Director of the Division of Vector-Borne Infectious Diseases, CDC for 15 years, during which time he led the development of the US national Lyme disease program, the global response to the 1994 Indian plague epidemic, the1999-2004 western Hemisphere epidemic of West Nile encephalitis, and was directly involved in responding to the 1999 Malaysia Nipah encephalitis epidemic. He was previously Director of the Asia-Pacific Institute of Tropical Medicine and Infectious Diseases at the University of Hawaii. He has served on numerous WHO committees and study groups, and scientific advisory boards of a number of institutes and companies. He is a Fellow of the Infectious Disease Society of America, Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and is past President and Fellow of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene.