Richard K. Riegelman

Richard K. Riegelman is Professor of Epidemiology and also holds an appointment in Medicine. He is the Founding Dean of The Milken Institute School of Public Health.

It takes vision and determination to guide a collection of disparate public health and health services programs into a single entity, as Professor Riegelman did in founding GW's School of Public Health  in 1997. As part of that effort, he expanded training opportunities at the School to include a number of doctoral and joint degree programs, created new research centers and launched initiatives in long-term care, health law and policy, health services research, community-oriented primary care, health information systems, health communications and distance education. He also led the development of the School's undergraduate major in public health, which has been offered since 2003.

In recent years Dr. Riegelman has spearheaded the national educated citizen and public health movement which aims to fulfill the Institute of Medicine's/ National Academy of Medicine’s recommendation that all undergraduates should have access to education in public health. As part of that effort he is now working with community colleges to incorporate them into the continuum of public health education.

Dr. Riegelman received his MD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and his MPH and PhD in epidemiology from the Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Riegelman began his many years of service at GW as a resident in internal medicine in 1976 and joined the medical school faculty two years later. In the years since, he has dedicated his career to the practice of medicine, to enhancing medical and public health training and to promoting critical evaluation of health research literature.

Richard Riegelman is author of Studying a Study and Testing a Test: Reading the Evidence-based Health Research 7th edition which is widely used to teach critical reading of health research and has been translated into Spanish and Japanese. Dr. Riegelman’s most recent publication is COVID-19 Global Lessons Learned, a set of six interactive digital case studies for use by public health, clinical, and health administration students. He is also lead author in Public Health 101: Improving Community Health 3rd edition which uses a population health approach to teach public health to undergraduate students.

In 2018 Dr. Riegelman received the Welch-Rose award, the highest individual award from the Association of Schools and Programs of Public Health (ASPPH) for his “extraordinary contributions to the academic public health community”. He is currently working with ASPPH to expand opportunities for public health education domestically and internationally.

Dr. Riegelman continues to teach undergraduate, masters and doctoral students. His current courses are PubH 1101 Introduction to Public Health and Health Services; PubH 3131 Epidemiology: Measuring Health and Disease; PubH 6242 Clinical Epidemiology and Public Health: Reading the Research; PubH 6243 Topics in Clinical Epidemiology and Public Health; PubH 6299 Reading the Epidemiology and Public Health Research for Doctoral Students; and PubH 8242 Topics in Clinical Epidemiology and Public Health for Doctoral Students.

Dr. Riegelman’s areas of expertise include clinical epidemiology, undergraduate public health education, and writing in public health