Howard Frumkin

Howard Frumkin, MD, DrPH is Senior Vice President of the Trust for Public Land, and professor emeritus of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences at the University of Washington School of Public Health, where he was Dean from 2010-2016. He was previously head of Our Planet, Our Health at the Wellcome Trust, director of the National Center for Environmental Health and Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (NCEH/ATSDR), and Special Assistant to the CDC Director for Climate Change and Health, and Professor and Chair of Environmental and Occupational Health at Emory University's Rollins School of Public Health and Professor of Medicine at Emory Medical School.

Dr. Frumkin has served on the Boards of the Bullitt Foundation, the Seattle Parks Foundation, the American Public Health Association, the US Green Building Council, the Children and Nature Network, and Physicians for Social Responsibility, among others. He has served on the Steering Committee of the Planetary Health Alliance (Harvard University), as a faculty affiliate at UCLA’s Center for Healthy Climate Solutions, and on advisory committees to the Global Consortium on Climate and Health Education (Columbia University), the Medical Society Consortium on Climate & Health (George Mason University), EcoHealth International, and the Yale Center on Climate Change and Health.

He is the author, co-author, or editor of over 300 scientific journal articles, chapters, and books, including the standard environmental health textbook, Environmental Health: From Global to Local, and four Island Press titles.

Dr. Frumkin is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians, the American College of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, Collegium Ramazzini, and the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland, and an elected member of the Washington State Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Medicine. He loves cycling, kayaking, and hiking. He is married to radio journalist Joanne Silberner, and has two children.

Making Healthy Places, Second Edition

Designing and Building for Well-Being, Equity, and Sustainability

The first edition of Making Healthy Places offered a visionary and thoroughly researched treatment of the connections between constructed environments and human health. Since its publication over 10 years ago, the field of healthy community design has evolved significantly to address major societal problems, including health disparities, obesity, and climate change.

Planetary Health

Protecting Nature to Protect Ourselves

Human health depends on the health of the planet. Earth’s natural systems—the air, the water, the biodiversity, the climate—are our life support systems. Yet climate change, biodiversity loss, scarcity of land and freshwater, pollution and other threats are degrading these systems. The emerging field of planetary health aims to understand how these changes threaten our health and how to protect ourselves and the rest of the biosphere.

Planetary Health: Protecting Nature to Protect Ourselves provides a readable introduction to this new paradigm.

Making Healthy Places

Designing and Building for Health, Well-being, and Sustainability

The environment that we construct affects both humans and our natural world in myriad ways. There is a pressing need to create healthy places and to reduce the health threats inherent in places already built. However, there has been little awareness of the adverse effects of what we have constructed-or the positive benefits of well designed built environments.

This book provides a far-reaching follow-up to the pathbreaking Urban Sprawl and Public Health, published in 2004.

Urban Sprawl and Public Health

Designing, Planning, and Building for Healthy Communities

In Urban Sprawl and Public Health, Howard Frumkin, Lawrence Frank, and Richard Jackson, three of the nation's leading public health and urban planning experts explore an intriguing question: How does the physical environment in which we live affect our health? For decades, growth and development in our communities has been of the low-density, automobile-dependent type known as sprawl.