Dr. Gary Slutkin

Dr. Gary Slutkin

Gary Slutkin, MD Founder and CEO, Cure Violence Formerly World Health Organization (WHO) Director, Intervention Development Professor, Epidemiology and Global Health, UIC School of Public Health Global Fellow, Ashoka

Dr. Gary Slutkin is a physician and epidemiologist formerly of the World Health Organization, the Founder and CEO of Cure Violence, and an innovator in health, behavior change, and data based approaches to local and global problems. Cure Violence is listed No. 12 among the top 500 NGOs in the World by The NGO Advisor. It is ranked 1st among all organizations in the world devoted to reducing violence. Cure Violence has been statistically demonstrated to reduce shootings and killings by 41% to 73% by extensive independent studies – by the U.S. Department of Justice, Johns Hopkins University, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and others. Some communities are reducing their rates to zero.

Dr. Slutkin received his M.D. from the University of Chicago Pritzker School Of Medicine, and completed his internship, residency, and infectious disease training at UCSF/San Francisco General Hospital, where he was also the Chief Resident in Medicine. Following his infectious disease training, Dr. Slutkin ran the Tuberculosis (TB) Program for San Francisco (1981- 5); moved to Somalia to work on TB and cholera epidemics (1985-7); and was then recruited by the World Health Organization where he worked from 1987 to 1994 with the WHO Global Program on AIDS in over 20 countries, including leading the efforts to start the country AIDS programs for the 13 countries in central and East Africa. He also led WHO’s efforts to reverse the AIDS epidemic in Uganda, and Uganda was the first country to be successful. He was then appointed Director of Intervention Development for WHO (Global Headquarters) responsible for guiding countries in behavior change methods, and where he also led their evaluation efforts.

Dr. Slutkin shifted his focus when he returned to the U.S. in 1995, and now leads the national and global work on re-defining violence as a contagious health process, pointing out that violence meets the definitions of both contagious (producing more of itself) and of disease (characteristic signs and symptoms producing morbidity and mortality). He also leads the efforts to demonstrate that treating violence as a contagious health epidemic yields strong results. His work has been best summarized in the 2013 Institute of Medicine Report, “The Contagion of Violence”. Dr. Slutkin is now also leading a national health effort to design more complete health and community based systems for reducing and sustaining community health and safety.

The Cure Violence method is working in over 60 communities in 25 cities in the U.S. and on five continents including programs in Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador, Colombia, Trinidad, Jamaica, Morocco, Nigeria, South Africa, Israel/West Bank, and Syria. Cure Violence is funded by the U.S. Department of Justice, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), and multiple national, international and local foundations and city, state and federal governments.

Dr. Slutkin’s work has been featured as the NY Times Sunday Magazine Cover Story, “Blocking The Transmission of Violence”, the award winning documentary film, “The Interrupters”, and in over a dozen books, most recently in Nicholas Kristof and Cheryl WuDunn’s book, “A Path Appears”. He has appeared on The PBS News Hour, CNN, 60 Minutes and in dozens of other television and radio stations, is quoted regularly in the NY Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, USA Today, The Guardian, Financial Times, The Economist, and other leading publications. National and international awards include the U.S. Attorney General’s Award for Public Safety, The Order of Lincoln Award, and the UNICEF Humanitarian of the Year Award.

Dr. Slutkin speaks regularly at local, national and global forums including The World Bank, Institute of Medicine, Davos World Economic Forum, Unicef, the UN, as well as corporate, religious, health and law enforcement conferences. He is a Professor of Epidemiology and Global Health at the University of Illinois at Chicago, a Global Ashoka fellow, and is a senior advisor to the World Health Organization (WHO). 5/3/17