Robert Wm. Blum MD, MPH, PhD

Robert Blum is the emeritus William H. Gates, Sr. Professor Bloomberg School of Public Health and the immediate past Director, Johns Hopkins Urban Health Institute.

He has edited two books, and has written over 325 journal articles, book chapters and special reports. Past-President of the Society for Adolescent Medicine and Health he has served on the American Board of Pediatrics; is a past chair of the Guttmacher Institute Board of Directors and was inaugural chair of the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Adolescent Health. In 2006, he was elected into membership into the NAM.

He is a consultant to The World Bank, UNICEF, the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) where recently he authored the guidance on adolescent pregnancy, the WHO where he has served on the TAG of the MCH Department as well as the Scientific and Technical Advisory Group of the Human Reproductive Program. In 2021 he lead the qualitative research for UNICEF’s State of the World Children’s Report on Adolescent Mental Health.

He has been awarded the Society for Adolescent Medicine’s Outstanding Achievement Award (1993); the APHA Herbert Needleman Award “for scientific achievement and courageous advocacy” on behalf of children and youth; Maternal and Child Health Bureau’s Vince Hutchins Award “…to a lifetime of distinguished service to improve the health of MCH populations;” In 2014 he received the American Public Health Association’s Martha May Eliot Award honoring “extraordinary service to mothers and children [and adolescents]”; and the University of Minnesota Outstanding Alumnus Award from the School of Public Health.

Over the past decade he served as the PI on a 10-country study of gender norms and their consequences among young adolescents—the Global Early Adolescent Study; and currently is co-lead on a three-country adolescent mental health study in Kenya, Indonesia and Vietnam.