Daniel R. Lucey

Dr. Daniel R. Lucey is an American physician, researcher, clinical professor of medicine of infectious diseases at Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth, and a research associate in anthropology at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, where he has co-organised an exhibition on eight viral outbreaks.

Lucey comes from a military family in California. He graduated in psychology from Dartmouth College in 1977, and after gaining an M.D. in 1982, he worked with people in San Francisco who had a previously unknown disease, later known as HIV/AIDS. He subsequently gained a masters in public health from Harvard School of Public Health.

He spent much of the 1990s studying HIV and vaccines. As chief of infectious diseases at the Washington Hospital Center, he had worked on preparations on what to do should there be an intentional release of an infectious agent. This came into operation when following the September 11 attacks of 2001, stockpiles of antibiotics were ready for the subsequent anthrax attacks. He later devised a staging system for inhalation anthrax and advocated the stockpiling of chest drains for its treatment should toxic fluid accumulate around the lungs.

In 2003, Lucey was involved in a campaign to administer smallpox vaccinations to hundreds of thousands of workers. The following year, he gave testimony following reports of high lead levels in Washington DC's public water system. The 'Lead Free Drinking Water Act of 2004' was introduced the following month.

He has analysed, monitored and responded to several emerging infectious diseases, including the SARS outbreaks of 2003 in China, Hong Kong and Canada, the subsequent H5N1 bird flu in South East Asia and Egypt, H1N1 flu in Egypt, nipah virus in Bangladesh, MERS in the Middle East and Republic of Korea, Ebola in Western Africa, Zika in Brazil, yellow fever in China, chikungunya in Pakistan, H7N9 in China and plague in Madagascar, followed by the 2018–20 Ebola epidemic in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the ongoing pandemic of coronavirus disease, caused by SARS-CoV-2, which began in 2019.

His awards include the 2024 Lester B. Granger Award from Dartmouth College and the United States Department of the Army's Commander's Award for Public Service, for the care he gave to those injured at The Pentagon on September 11, 2001.

He currently teaches in the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies Program at Dartmouth in the Medical Humanities concentration as well as at The Dartmouth Institute.^[1]