Dr. Lee Riley is professor and head of the Division of Infectious Disease and Vaccinology and a member of the Division of Epidemiology at the School of Public Health, University of California, Berkeley. He is a physician who has been trained in both epidemiology and molecular biology research. He did his undergraduate studies at Stanford University, where he received a B.A. in philosophy. He went to medical school at University of California, San Francisco, and completed a residency in internal medicine at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital in New York. After residency, he joined the Epidemic Intelligence Service at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and then became an infectious disease fellow at Stanford University School of Medicine. Later he joined the World Health Organization to work as a project manager for a program called India Biomedical Support Project in New Delhi, India, for two years. He became an assistant professor of medicine at Cornell University Medical College, and moved to University of California, Berkeley, in 1996 as a professor of epidemiology and infectious disease.

At UC Berkeley, Riley regularly teaches four courses: Molecular Epidemiology of Infectious Diseases, Principles of Infectious Diseases, Current Topics in Vaccinology, and Epidemiology Seminar. He has published more than 180 peer-reviewed papers and book chapters. In 2004, he published a textbook, Molecular Epidemiology of Infectious Diseases: Principles and Practices, by ASM Press. He served as the program director for Fogarty’s International Training and Research in Emerging Infectious Diseases at UC Berkeley (1997-2003), Tuberculosis Training and Research (1998-2003), and Global Infectious Diseases (since 2003). He has been elected as a fellow to the American Association of Advancement of Science (1998), Infectious Disease Society of America (2002), and American Academy of Microbiology (2004). He was a member of the NIH’s Fogarty International Center’s Advisory Committee from 2003 to 2007. He currently has collaborators in Brazil, India and Japan.

Riley’s current research work involves tuberculosis, drug-resistant bacterial infections, and infectious diseases of urban slums.