David Freedman New ISTM Secretary/Treasurer
Karl Neumann, MD, FAAP
By a unanimous vote of the Executive Board, David Freedman has been appointed secretary/treasurer of the ISTM, a role that he is eminently qualified to fulfill. He replaces Frank von Sonnenburg who becomes President-elect.
David easily belongs to the small group of dedicated and foresighted individuals who, in the future, will be looked back upon as one of the founding fathers of travel medicine. Moreover, he possesses the professional, intellectual, organizational and technical skills so necessary to successfully serve a young, dynamic and rapidly growing organization. People who have worked with him are invariably impressed by his mastery of computers and other electronic sciences.
David was born in Montreal, Canada. He received his undergraduate degree from Montreal's McGill University where early on he showed his strengths and future direction by winning first honors in physiology. He received his medical degree and did his residency training at the University of Toronto. The following four years were spent in an immunoparisitology fellowship at the U.S. National Institute of Health. Along the way, and in his "spare time," he became certified in infectious diseases by the American Board of Internal Medicine and by the Royal College of Physicians of Canada.
In 1989, David made the move south, joining the University of Alabama/ Birmingham's Division of Geographic Medicine as clinical director, a post he still holds. For the past few years he has also been professor of medicine. In addition, he has served as a member of the U.S. Veterans Administration's Merit Review Infectious Diseases Study Section (1997-2000) and as chair of the Advisory Panel on Parasitic Diseases of the United States Pharmacopeia (1995-2000), and has worked on research projects in India, Guatemala, Ghana, Brazil, and Peru.
David is the author of numerous publications in travel and tropical medicine, co-editor of a popular travel medicine reference text, and director of the Gorgas Course in Tropical Medicine in Peru. This course, which accepts 50 participants a year, mostly from industrialized countries, provides on-site clinical teaching to graduate physicians, using novel techniques while maintaining traditional accreditation standards. The waiting list to take the course is often more than a year.
He is a founding director of GeoSentinel, the world-wide, CDC-funded, ISTM-member-operated clinics which serve as early disease surveillance units. These units help build the GeoSentinel database which already stores information on more than 45,000 ill returned travelers. David is largely responsible for characterization of infectious disease morbidity in travelers and migrants using innovative electronic communications modalities. The database will be available for travel medicine research and publications for years to come.
Some of his other travel medicine-related achievements include the development of strategies to track global trends in disease and occupational health risk among employees of multinational corporations, and his serving as chief medical advisor to a consortium project serving over 20 large multinationals and governmental entities.
Within the ISTM, David has worked his way through the ranks: scientific program chair for two CISTM Conferences (2001, 2005), founding chair of the ISTM Electronic Communications Committee and the TravelMed listserv, and Counselor (1999-2003), taking a lead role in negotiating the financial aspects of the ISTM's new 5-year publishing contract (see next column). This contract gives ISTM much more favorable terms than in the past, providing money for other ISTM initiatives in the future. David is also responsible for ISTM's transition into a fully web-based administrative system.
"Having worked closely with David for many years, I can assure you there is no better person to assume the role of secretary/treasurer," says Brad Connor, immediate past president of ISTM. "He is known for his integrity, energy, and attention to detail. He has been my most trusted advisor during my tenure as president and has always been available with his keen insight and excellent judgment to help me through some of the more challenging moments of the past two years. His detailed knowledge of virtually all aspects of the ISTM's operation has allowed him to 'hit the ground running' in his new role."
What is David's favorite pastime? No surprise here. Travel and seeing new places, of course.
Karl is editor of NewsShare
