Plenary
Dr. Peter Katona
David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA
Title: Biological Terrorism: Not a question of IF but WHEN
Dr. Peter Katona is Clinical Professor of Medicine in Infectious Diseases at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and Adjunct Professor of Public Health at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. He has worked at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) as an EIS Officer studying viral diseases and doing epidemic investigation; and at Apria/Corum Healthcare as their Corporate Medical Director.
Dr. Katona has held appointments at Louisiana State University’s National Center for Biomedical Research and Training, and the Los Angeles County Emergency Management Services (EMS) Agency. He is a member of the LA County EMS Agency Disaster Coalition Advisory Committee, the Infectious Diseases Society of America’s National and Global Public Health Committee, the Pacific Council on International Policy’s Homeland Security Committee and served on the FDA’s Anti-Infective Drugs Advisory Committee. He served as Chairman of the UCLA Hospital Infection Control Committee. He holds a seat at the Business Operations Center of the LA City Emergency Operations Center. He has authored articles on medical informatics, medical education, influenza, polio, nutrition, bioterrorism, disasters, and the future of health care. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
He is developing a project to do disease surveillance using social networking in Vietnam, and a project to study healthcare vulnerabilities to catastrophic disasters in Los Angeles.
Dr. Katona is an internationally recognized authority on bioterrorism and has lectured throughout the world on this topic. He teaches a yearly Honors course at UCLA on terrorism, and has edited the books Countering Terrorism and WMD: Creating a Global Counter-Terrorism Network, and Global Biosecurity: Threats and Responses, with a book on the vulnerability of healthcare to disasters in progress. He maintains a private practice in infectious diseases and sits on the Boards of the LA Emergency Preparedness Foundation, the Good Hope Foundation, the Toffler Trust and the University of Florida School of Medicine.
