Dr. Robert Heimer is a professor in Epidemiology of Microbial Diseases at the Yale School of Public Health. His major research efforts over the past twenty-five years have included scientific investigation at the interface of addictive disorders and infectious disease. Areas of investigation include pharmacological treatment of opiate addiction, HIV, hepatitis C, and hepatitis B epidemiology, and overdose prevention and resuscitation. His highly interdisciplinary research evaluates the effectiveness of intervention programs and on the contexts and consequences of drug abuse that provide information needed to assist educational and advocacy efforts. Dr. Heimer is senior member of the Interdisciplinary Research Methods Core at Yale's Center for Interdisciplinary Research on AIDS (CIRA). The Core's missions are to provide centralized expertise in quantitative methods and biostatistics, qualitative methods and ethnography, and molecular epidemiology and offer resources for research design and for the collection, management, and analysis of data. Dr. Heimer also serves as the Director of the Yale office of the Connecticut Emerging Infections Program. This Centers for Disease Control and Prevention-funded program is one of ten programs nationwide that seek to assess, through population-based surveillance, the public health impact of emerging infectious diseases and to evaluate methods for their prevention and control in the community. The Yale program currently focuses on influenza, foodborne illnesses, and community-acquired Clostridium difficile infections, the impact human papillomavirus vaccination, and Lyme disease prevention and medical costs. Dr. Heimer received his training in molecular biology and pharmacology at Columbia College (BA) and Yale University (MA, PhD). He began his work on the prevention of HIV among injection drug users in 1990 with an evaluation of the city-run New Haven needle exchange program and his work on emerging infections in 1995 with studies of the tick-borne agents of human anaplasmosis and ehrlichiosis.