Initiative for Environmental-Health Disparities and Medicine
Robert S. Levine
Dr. Robert S. Levine is a Professor in the Department of Family and Community Medicine. He is a Fellow of the American College of Preventive Medicine and has longstanding research and clinical interests in public health and racial and ethnic health disparities. Dr. Levine’s clinical practice includes general prevention, smoking cessation and weight management. His writings include more than 250 scientific works, and he has directed and collaborated on numerous peer-reviewed scientific projects. Presently, he is focusing on geographic variations in racial disparities, searching in particular for communities that have successfully overcome the barriers of poverty.
Dr. Levine began his career as a public health officer, and has collaborated with county and state health departments, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Pan American Health Organization, the World Health Organization, and the United States Agency for International Development. For eleven years, he was on the faculty of the University of Miami School of Medicine where he was Associate Director of its World Health Organization Collaborating Center for Pesticide Epidemiology. He developed estimates of the magnitude of pesticide effects on human health, and taught extensively about ways to prevent pesticide related illnesses. A member of the Meharry faculty for 16 years, he has assisted with the development of training programs in farm worker safety, and has collaborated on scientific papers showing elevated risks of illness among racial and ethnic workers in high risk occupations. His affiliation with the MMC-VU ARCH consortium program allows him to work collaboratively with colleagues in the Basic Sciences in translational research investigating the role of environmental contaminant exposure on geographic variations health outcomes among minority populations.
Dr. Levine earned his M.D. from Bowman Gray (now Wake Forest) University in 1968. He completed residency training in General Preventive Medicine at the University of Kentucky in 1972, and in 1974, he became the 343rd person certified by the American Board of Preventive Medicine
