Richard J. Jackson

Richard J. Jackson, MD, MPH, is Professor and Chair of Environmental Health Sciences at the School of Public Health at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is also a faculty member in the departments of Pediatrics, Urban Planning, and the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at UCLA. A pediatrician and public health leader, he has served as State Health Officer for California and in many other leadership positions in both the environmental health and infectious disease fields. For nine years he was director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) National Center for Environmental Health in Atlanta, for which he received the Presidential Distinguished Service award.
While in California he helped establish the California Birth Defects Monitoring Program and state and national laws to reduce risks from dangerous pesticides, especially to farm workers and children. While at the CDC, he established the national asthma epidemiology and control program, oversaw the Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Program, and instituted the current federal effort to "biomonitor" chemical levels in the U.S. population. In the late 1990s he was the CDC leader in establishing the U.S. National Pharmaceutical Stockpile to prepare for terrorism and other disasters (the stockpile was activated on September 11, 2001). He has received the Breast Cancer Fund's Hero Award, as well as Lifetime Achievement Awards from the Public Health Law Association and New Partners for Smart Growth. He received an MD from the University of California at San Francisco and an MPH from the University of California at Berkeley.
Dr. Jackson lectures and speaks on many issues, particularly those related to the built environment and health. He has co-authored two Island Press Books: Urban Sprawl and Public Health and, more recently, Making Healthy Places: Designing and Building for Health, Well-Being, and Sustainability with Andrew L. Dannenberg and Howard Frumkin. He is the narrator of a 2011 PBS special Designing Healthy Communities. He has served on many environmental and health boards, as well as the Board of Directors of the American Institute of Architects.

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.