Robert S. Lawrence

Bob Lawrence is Center for a Livable Future Professor Emeritus in the Department of Environmental Health and Engineering at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the founding director of the Center for a Livable Future (CLF). He graduated from Harvard Medical School and is a founding director of Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), a human rights advocacy group that shared the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize for its efforts to ban anti-personnel landmines. Dr. Lawrence chaired the first U.S. Preventive Services Task Force and has chaired committees for the Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council. Before joining Johns Hopkins, he served as the director of Health Sciences at the Rockefeller Foundation, where he directed programs in Agricultural Sciences, Population Sciences, and Environmental Sciences, gaining insight into the connections among agriculture, food production, population, the environment, and public health. In 1996, Bob, alongside a team from within and outside Johns Hopkins, established CLF, which has since grown significantly and continues to focus on using the best available science to highlight the relationships among agriculture, diet, environment, and public health.