Biography and Research Interests
I am a historian of science and medicine with a research focus on the history of psychiatry, epidemiology, and public health. My dissertation examines the formation of psychiatric epidemiology inside the World Health Organization in the three decades following World War Two. I live in Geneva with my wife and daughter and am affiliated with Professor Bruno Strasser's project Rethinking Science and Public Participation at the University of Geneva.
Publications
- David Robertson and Peter Doshi, The end of the pandemic will not be televised,' British Medical Journal, vol. 375, issue 8319, (2021): 1-3.
- David Robertson, ‘Of Mice and Schoolchildren: A Conceptual History of ‘Herd Immunity’,’ American Journal of Public Health, vol. 111, no. 8, (2021): 1473-1480.
- David Robertson, 'Evaluating the Aboriginal Child’s Mind: Assimilation and Cross-Cultural Psychology in Australia,' History of Psychiatry, vol. 29, no. 3, (2018): 331-349.
- David Robertson, Raymond L. Specht and Barry Nurcombe, 'Assessment of Mental Health in Indigenous Australians: The Role of John Ewart Cawte, a Pioneer in Transcultural Research,' Health and History, vol. 16, no. 2, (2014): 107-114.
Awards
- 2020 Early Career Award, European Society for the History of the Human Sciences for 2019 conference paper: 'The World Health Organization and the Emergence of an Information Infrastructure in Postwar Psychiatric Epidemiology.'
- Graduate Student Fellow 2019-2020, Prize Fellowship in the Social Sciences, Princeton University.
A complete copy of my resume can be requested by contacting me by email: davidjr@princeton.edu