David L. Blazes, MD is the Director of the Emerging Infections Program at the Naval Medical Research Center Detachment in Lima, Peru, and represents the DoD-Global Emerging Infection Surveillance and Response System (DoD-GEIS) in Latin America. He is also Assistant Professor of Medicine at the Uniformed Services University in Bethesda, Maryland and Associate in International Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. He graduated from the US Naval Academy in 1991 and the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in 1995. He completed his medical training at the National Naval Medical Center, the President's hospital in Bethesda. His main research interests are infectious diseases surveillance strategies in developing settings, optimizing outbreak response, public health policy, and tropical medicine training. He teaches clinical tropical medicine at the Gorgas course at Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia, at the Johns Hopkins Summer Institute of Tropical Medicine and at the US Military Tropical Medicine course in Bethesda. He has published numerous manuscripts about public health policy issues and a variety of tropical medicine topics. In July 2008, he will return to Bethesda to work at the Headquarters of the DoD-GEIS.