Amy Fairchild

Amy Fairchild

Amy Fairchild

Dean, Professor, Public Health

fairchild.139@osu.edu

Areas of Expertise

  • Immigrant Health Inspection
  • Disease Control
  • Disease Surveillance and Privacy
  • Public Health Issues
  • Tobacco Control

Education

  • Columbia University, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Subcommittee on Sociomedical Sciences, PhD, 1997
  • Columbia University School of Public Health, Division of Sociomedical Sciences, MPH, 1990
  • University of Texas at Austin, BA in Plan II Honors Program, with highest honors, 1987

Amy Lauren Fairchild is a historian who works at the intersection of history, public health ethics, and public health policy and politics. Whether exploring the tension between privacy and surveillance, immigration and border control, or paternalism and liberty, Fairchild assesses the social, political, and ethical factors that shape not only the potential and limits of the state to intervene for the common good but also what counts as evidence.

Fairchild has written two books: Science at the Borders: Immigrant Medical Inspection and the Shaping of the Modern Industrial Labor Force and Searching Eyes: Privacy, the State, and Disease Surveillance in America (with Ronald Bayer and James Colgrove). In addition, she has published in leading journals including the New England Journal of Medicine, Health Affairs, the American Journal of Public Health, Science, and JAMA.

Fairchild joined the faculty of OSU in July, 2019, after 20 years at Columbia University and 3 at Texas A&M. She feels extraordinarily privileged to serve as Dean of the College of Public Health at The Ohio State University. Any university with the chutzpah to have a poison seed for a mascot is the kind of place she wants to be.
 

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