Fogarty welcomes its new leader, Steven Schiff
May/June 2026 | Volume 25 Number 3
Photo courtesy of Yale University
Fogarty Director, Dr. Steven Schiff
Steven Schiff, MD, PhD, joined the Fogarty International Center as its Director in June. He has also been appointed Associate Director for International Research at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). A pediatric neurosurgeon, Schiff is interested in neural control engineering, sustainable health engineering, and global health.
Prior to Fogarty, Schiff served as the Harvey and Kate Cushing Professor of Neurosurgery, Vice Chair for Global Health, Department of Neurosurgery, and Professor of Epidemiology and of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Yale University.
NIH Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya said of him: “Dr. Schiff brings nearly 40 years of experience in global health, epidemiology of microbial diseases, and pediatric neurological disorders to NIH. His groundbreaking work on developing the concept of predictive personalized public health will bring a cutting-edge scientific mind to the NIH leadership team.”
Schiff founded the Center for Neural Engineering at Penn State University and has worked to develop the Center for Global Neurosurgery at Yale. He received the NIH Director’s Pioneer and Transformative Awards in 2015 and 2018, respectively. He has worked toward the sustainable control of infant infections in the developing world, and this has evolved into an exploration of what he calls ‘predictive personalized public health.’ He also led the discovery of a highly lethal infant brain disease, known as neonatal paenibacilliosis, which is an invasive infection caused most commonly by the bacterium P. thiaminolyticus, and is increasingly recognized as an underdiagnosed cause of neonatal sepsis, particularly in resource-limited settings as well as recently recognized in U.S. infants.
After receiving his undergraduate degree in Biology from MIT, Schiff earned his MD and completed his general surgery internship, PhD, and neurosurgery residency at Duke University. He completed his pediatric neurosurgery fellowship at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, American College of Surgeons, American Association of Neurological Surgery, American Physical Society, and the American Epilepsy Society. He serves on the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Medical Devices Advisory Committee and as a member of the Executive Committee, Topical Group on Medical Physics of the American Physical Society. He has published nearly 250 scientific papers across a variety of topics, including neural control engineering, sustainable health engineering, and global health.
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Updated June 22, 2026
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