Global disease detective, influential policy advocate, and generous mentor: Prof. Arthur L. Reingold’s enduring impact on public health

In the late 1990s, Dr. Tomás J. ​Aragón, then Communicable Disease Controller at of the San Francisco Department of Public Health, got an emergency call from a local hospital. Ambulances had rushed 60 people in from a Union Square hotel with what looked like a terrible stomach flu. More sick patients were on their way.

It was Aragón’s job to figure out what caused the illness and how to prevent other people from catching it.

He turned for help to Dr. Arthur Reingold, professor of epidemiology at UC Berkeley School of Public Health and a former “disease detective” at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Reingold had a group of students from his outbreak investigations course look into the outbreak. Together, Aragón’s team and Reingold’s students interviewed more than 360 patients and hotel workers. They took blood samples, checked food preparation sites for contamination, and analyzed leftovers.

In the end, Reingold’s student disease detectives helped identify the culprit: a custard cream pie, tainted with norovirus, likely by an infected food service worker.

Aragón was grateful for the assistance. And Reingold, a physician who came to UC Berkeley from the CDC in 1985, was pleased to give his students the opportunity to conduct real-time infectious disease outbreak investigations with Aragón’s office.

“The students would do the investigations with me supervising them, but in close collaboration with staff in the health department,” said Reingold, who retired from the school of public health July 1 after 40 years at UC Berkeley. “They got incredible experience. At least three of their papers they wrote describing their investigations were sufficiently important and of high enough quality that they were published in excellent journals, which is a high standard.”

High standards are a cornerstone of Reingold’s legacy at the school of public health. He has taught and mentored hundreds of students, many of whom are now public health leaders and practitioners around the world. And he’s done it while earning international esteem for his work on prevention and control of infectious diseases, among them: tuberculosis, meningitis, and most recently, COVID-19.

A major role in bringing two key programs to UC Berkeley and a commitment to public service

In 1989, Reingold launched the National Institutes of Health–funded AIDS International Training and Research Program (AITRP). For over 30 years, the program supported training individuals from diverse low income countries by bringing them to Berkeley and San Francisco for various types of instruction, as well as through in-country short courses. Over the life of the program, it supported training of hundreds of graduate students, post-doctoral fellows, and faculty. That program ended in 2014, after which Reingold ran two smaller, similar programs in Zimbabwe and Uganda, which he then turned over to junior colleagues to direct.

In 1994, he launched the CDC-funded California Emerging Infections Program (CEIP), currently administered by the non-profit Heluna Health. As part of a CDC network, CEIP works on surveillance, prevention, and control of emerging infectious diseases and provides training for students as a collaboration with the California Department of Public Health, UCSF, and multiple Bay Area local county health departments. While the program was begun at UC Berkeley School of Public Health, Reingold and his team decided it would be smoother to run it via a nonprofit organization.

Reingold’s intense commitment to public service is evident in the dozens of government and academic panels he has joined over the years.

“He never says no,” said Dr. Claire Broome, former acting director of the CDC who supervised Reingold for some of his time there. “I’m in awe of his ability to get things done.”

For example, Reingold led the state of California’s COVID-19 Vaccine Safety Task Force and working groups, founded in 2020, which expanded to include Oregon, Washington and Nevada, and advised the western state governors on COVID-19 and COVID-19 vaccine policy.

Dr. Erica Pan, director and state public health officer for the California Department of Public Health, who organized the task force, said she brought Reingold in as soon as possible.

“Of course I called Art and said, ‘Would you help us and chair the group?’” she said. “And the poor guy did. There were lots of late nights and weekends. He really stepped up in such a huge way. And we paid him zero for this. He was amazing, of course.”

Reingold spent many years as head of the division of epidemiology at UC Berkeley. He has published over 400 papers and never missed a semester teaching his course in outbreak investigations, as well as many other courses and seminars—sometimes as many as eight courses a year, which he believes is a campus record.

He has also served on numerous National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine expert panels which, among other things, assembled the evidence to make a convincing case that the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes COVID-19 infection, was transmitted by aerosols—droplets in the air. In addition, he has chaired and served on numerous advisory committees on infectious diseases for both the World Health Organization and the CDC, including the influential Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices.

“Art is a giant,” said Dr. Albert Ko, an infectious disease specialist at Yale University and program director of the Fogarty/NIH Global Scholars Equity Program, which has funded much of Reingold’s work for the past 25 years.

“He’s an iconic figure for public health on so many different fronts, from research to public service. But it’s really the teaching in which this comes through—his commitment and dedication to the value of training future public health leaders—the next generation.”

Maya Petersen, UC Berkeley School of Public Health professor of biostatistics and epidemiology, and one of Reingold’s former students, is grateful for his guidance. At first, she said, she was very nervous about meeting the famously blunt professor. Then, she saw a newspaper cut out attached to his office door: It read, “Art doesn’t have to be intimidating.”

“So at the first meeting, I was already laughing,” said Petersen, who is also co-director of the UCSF-UC Berkeley Joint Program in Computational Precision Health, and co-director of UC Berkeley’s Center for Targeted Machine Learning and Causal Inference.

“I was smitten by the class. Art is so inspiring. Because of that class, I decided that doing a master’s wasn’t enough and got my PhD.”

“He has a remarkable ability to see people where they are and where they want to get to and respect that and meet them there,” Petersen said. “It seems like he’s personally trained half the healthcare public and global health workforce.”

Born into academia, intrigued by medical detective work

Arthur Lawrence Reingold was born in Chicago, in 1948, into an academic family. His father was a mathematician. His mother was a social worker, who died when he was 15.

“It was in high school that I decided I wanted to be a doctor,” he said. “I was probably driven by the fact that my mother died of premenopausal breast cancer at age 49, when I was 15. If Freud were here, he’d probably say something about that influencing my motivation.”

He graduated from the University of Chicago and entered the university’s six-year MD-PhD program two days later.

Despite conducting basic biological laboratory research for almost three years, including one year at Oxford, he was not a success in the lab and did not complete his PhD, only his MD.

Reingold’s family had an unusual view of his career choice.

“I was the only person in my family without a PhD,” he said. “In my family, a PhD is a sign of superior intellectual accomplishment—and an MD is sort of a trade degree. I had the best of mentors, the best of circumstances, and I just discovered it wasn’t for me.”

He did an internal medicine residency at Harvard’s Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, Mass. Then, as an avid reader of Berton Roueche’s medical detective stories in The New Yorker, Reingold was intrigued by the growing field of epidemiology. He decided to join the CDC’s Epidemic Intelligence Service, a two-year training program.

“In two years at CDC I fell in love with public health and epidemiology,” he said. “The figuring out ‘who done it’ of disease detective work.’’

His first post was in Hartford, Conn. There, he solved the case of a local oral surgeon who was infecting multiple patients with the hepatitis B virus. The oral surgeon ended up losing his license.

“It was a disaster for him, but it sort of just got me going, if you will, in terms of detective work,” Reingold said.

He stayed in CDC for eight years, working on outbreaks of Legionnaires’ Disease, meningococcal meningitis, and other bacterial and fungal infections.

During that time he married Dr. Gail A. Bolan, a CDC physician and expert in sexually transmitted diseases. She went on to become a world-renowned expert in sexually transmitted diseases and director of that division at the CDC, after serving in the same capacity for San Francisco and California for many years.

While at the agency, Reingold became one of the world’s leading experts on toxic shock syndrome, an acute-onset illness characterized by fever, low blood pressure, sunburn-like rash, and end-organ damage. He published his first paper on the syndrome, which was associated with high absorbency tampon use in menstruating women in 1980. Eventually, that type of tampon was taken off the market or reformulated.

In 1985, Reingold came to UC Berkeley School of Public Health, first as a CDC employee and visiting lecturer. Then, in 1987 he became a professor of epidemiology. He soon teamed up with friends at UCSF and in 1989 won a major NIH grant from a new program created by the National Institutes of Health’s Fogarty International Center.

“It was a very generous program,” Reingold said. “We’d bring people here from low income countries and then help them with research when they went home. Over the years, the program shrunk, and has changed substantially. But so far, two of those Fogarty trainees have received the [Elise and Walter A.] Haas International Award from UC Berkeley.”

The annual Haas award is given to a UC Berkeley alum who is a native, citizen, or resident of another country and who has a distinguished record of service to that country. The two former Fogarty fellows who have received the honor are Dr. Moses R. Kamya of Uganda (2022)—who returned to his country and became dean of Makerere University Medical School and is now a world-renowned leader in medical training in sub Saharan Africa—and Dr. Marcos Espinal of the Dominican Republic (2007) who has done groundbreaking work on tuberculosis and has had a very distinguished career at the Pan American Health Organization.

In an email praising Reingold, Kamya wrote, “Dr. Reingold is a mentor with a large heart. His generous investment in training and mentorship has had a powerful multiplier effect. Through his guidance, I have gone on to mentor and train many others.”

“What struck me the most was that his support did not end when I left Berkeley. As my interest in malaria research deepened, Dr. Reingold facilitated my travel to UCSF to meet with Dr. Philip Rosenthal, a leading malariologist. That meeting laid the foundation for a research collaboration that formally began in 1998 and continues to this day.”

Reingold notes that he’s recommended another student for the 2026 award.

“I have my fingers crossed for a trainee who came from India, who perhaps will win it this year,” he said. “Then I can retire with three Haas award winners.”

To Reingold, the most satisfying aspect of his Fogarty-supported work with foreign trainees has been watching them return home and put their new skills to use, while also helping train others.

Equally satisfying to Reingold were the results of a different Fogarty-supported training program he directed, the Minority Health International Research Training Program. This program provided underrepresented UC Berkeley undergraduates their first global health research experience in a low or middle income country. Over the course of the years, he supported such experiences for over 100 Berkeley undergraduates.

“That was a big deal,” he said. “It’s been one of the most rewarding things I’ve done in my career.’’

The California Emerging Infections Program (CEIP) that Reingold started in Berkeley grew out of his work at CDC. Reingold, who has served as director since its inception in 1994, established it in collaboration with the public health departments of Alameda, Contra Costa and San Francisco counties, along with, what he calls, “the People’s Republic of Berkeley.”

Last year, the program celebrated its 30th anniversary. There are now 12 such centers in the country.

“We had many students who worked on it,” he said. “Masters students, doctoral students, doctors from UCSF who were in training. They would get public health experience and access to data needed to do studies.”

He may continue to be an investigator there.

“They’ll probably ask me to keep doing it, but you know, it’s up to them.”

One case Reingold recalls the CEIP students working on was an in-hospital outbreak of a very unusual bacterium, Serratia marcescens, occurring among patients who had undergone cardiac surgery.

It turned out that the patients were getting infected by a nurse who used an exfoliant cream every Sunday after her bath. The cream was loaded with Serratia. The patients who were operated on Mondays and Tuesdays tended to get infected most often. The other problem that Reingold’s student investigators found was the artificial fingernails that the nurse wore. The ragged edges of the nurse’s nails ripped holes in the gloves and allowed the bacteria to get into patients’ wounds.

That investigation led to a change in national policy, Reingold said. No longer would people in operating rooms be permitted to wear artificial fingernails.

Reingold is happy that the importance of epidemiology to public health is now more widely recognized.

“If we want people to be as healthy as they can be, if we want to prevent or minimize the chances of injury, illness, and poor health, we need to understand the factors that lead to an increased risk of various bad things happening,” he said.

“Some people take apart genes in the lab and that’s fine. Some people take apart the viruses and bacteria in the lab and that’s fine. But I think we really need to study people—what puts some at greater risk, what puts some at less risk—and then use that information to inform our policies and approaches to improving health, and preventing disease and injury.”

On occasions when Reingold serves as an expert witness in legal cases, he is bemused when opposing counsel points out his lack of formal training in epidemiology.

“The other side sometimes points out that I have no training in epidemiology other than the two years in the training program at CDC,” he said. “I’ve never taken a course, and have no masters or doctoral degree. But I’ve read a lot. You could say I’m self-educated or uneducated, depending on your point of view!”

He’s worried about the future of public health in America.

“I don’t know anyone in my line of work who isn’t gravely disturbed and dispirited over what’s happened over these past months,” he said. “I don’t know anyone who thinks RFK is the best person to be our Secretary of HHS.”

For the most part, Reingold said, he’s not talking to his friends at NIH and CDC—in case their calls are monitored.

A reputation as a tough teacher

As beloved as he is, Reingold is aware that some students consider him a tough teacher.

“I think some students find me abrasive and not supportive of alternative views,” he said. “My point of view is you should learn how to read carefully, think critically, speak and write clearly, and be able to defend your views.”

“I want to argue about it and I want other people in the room to benefit from that conversation. So, I could do better. I have a hard time overcoming my own personality.”

He wishes that students entered Berkeley with better writing skills.

“I’m infamous because every student paper, every thesis, everything I read, I print and I hand edit line by line,” he said. “On hard copy, with a red pen. I can’t stop myself.”

One thing many of Reingold’s former students remain grateful for is his encouragement for balancing work and family life. Petersen, for example, recalls Reingold firmly telling her she could and should make time for her family. He’s always done so himself.

“I’ve been blessed to have a wife who is smarter than me,” Reingold said, “and who is more organized than me. We’ve been able to have a two-career family and still get our three kids ready, raised, and out the door.”

Their division of labor was perhaps unusual when they started out as a couple. Dr. Bolan does all the driving and handles their finances while Reingold does all of the grocery shopping and cooking.

“There have been a few unfortunate accidents, and I’m not allowed to do laundry,” he said.
As he prepares to retire, he’s looking forward to spending more time with his three children and three grandchildren, with a fourth due in early 2026. He’s also catching up with his many friends.
Several months ago, he was having lunch with some retired faculty members, all very distinguished. One of them expressed sympathy over Reingold’s 40 year teaching career.

“If you hadn’t wasted your entire career teaching too much, you could have changed the world,” Reingold remembered his colleague telling him.

But Reingold couldn’t disagree more. To him, teaching at UC Berkeley School of Public Health was the “best job in the world.”

“I don’t know how I could have changed the world more than I did by working with people from all around the U.S. and all these countries, having them at home for dinner, for parties with my children, meeting them and being exposed to people from all around the U.S. and, around the world,” he said. “It was the best thing I did in my life, frankly, other than marrying a wonderful woman and having three wonderful children.”