Ezra Susser, M.D., Dr.P.H., is Professor and Chair of the Department of Epidemiology at the Mailman School of Public Health of Columbia University, Professor of Psychiatry, and Head of the Department of Epidemiology of Brain Disorders at New York State Psychiatric Institute. He was an HIV Center investigator for many years, and is today a member of its Strategic Planning Group. .

He has developed and tested a culturally appropriate HIV intervention for minority homeless mentally ill men that is highly focused, uses skills training methods that have proven effective in schizophrenia, targets critical barriers to behavior change, takes into account patterns of sexual relationships, and addresses the relationship between psychiatric symptoms and risky sexual behaviors. He has been a key participant in several large scale efforts to introduce HIV/AIDS treatment and prevention in Africa, and he has advocated for the integration of expertise on mental health into the global campaign against HIV.

Dr. Susser continues with his primary research on the epidemiology of mental disorders and on the role of early life experience in health and disease throughout the life course. Seeking to identify hypothesized neurodevelopmental etiologies of schizophrenia, Dr. Susser and colleagues have used longitudinal studies of unique birth cohorts, such as that exposed to the Dutch Hunger Winter of 1944-45 and that defined by the Child Health and Development Study of 1959-66 to determine if there is an interaction between genetic predisposition to schizophrenia and early prenatal exposures such as maternal nutrient deficiency and maternal infection. He recently established The IMPRINTS Center, a collaborative birth cohort research program in which epidemiologists seek to uncover the causes of a broad range of disease and health outcomes, including psychiatric and neurodevelopmental disorders, obesity, cardiovascular disease, reproductive performance, and breast and ovarian cancers.

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