David Heymann is a Professor of Infectious Disease Epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM). He is also a Distinguished Fellow at the Centre on Universal Health at Chatham House, London. From 2009 to 2012 he was chairman of the UK Health Protection Agency, and from 2012 to March 2017 chairman of Public Health England.
For 22 years Heymann was based at the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva on secondment from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). He was the World Health Organization’s assistant director-general for health security and environment and representative of the director-general for polio eradication. From 1998 to 2003 he was executive director of the WHO Communicable Diseases Cluster, during which he headed the global response to SARS, and before that was director for the WHO program on emerging and other infectious diseases.