David Addiss is Director of the Focus Area for Compassion and Ethics (FACE) at the Task Force for Global Health in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. After working as a general medical practitioner in migrant health, David joined the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) as an Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) Officer in 1985, assigned to the Wisconsin Division of Health. He completed a Preventive Medicine residency at CDC and worked in the CDC’s Division of Parasitic Diseases, 1988-2006, where he focused on the control and prevention of neglected tropical diseases, particularly lymphatic filariasis. David co-directed the WHO Collaborating Center on Elimination of Lymphatic Filariasis in the Americas. He spent four years as a senior program officer at the Fetzer Institute in Kalamazoo, Michigan, where he directed a research program on science and spirituality and established initiatives on the neuroscience of compassion, contemplative neuroscience, and interfaith peacebuilding. During this time, he enrolled in a lay chaplaincy training program at Upaya Zen Center, which he completed in 2014.
David joined the Task Force for Global Health in 2011, where he directed Children Without Worms (CWW), a partnership between the Task Force and Johnson & Johnson to prevent and control soil-transmitted helminthiasis (STH). In 2017, he helped to establish the Secretariat for the Global Partnership for Zero Leprosy, also at the Task Force, where he served as senior advisor until 2019. In 2018, he established the Focus Area for Compassion and Ethics (FACE). Since 2016, David has taught global health ethics at the University of Notre Dame, where he is Adjunct Professor in the Eck Institute for Global Health. He is also Adjunct Professor in the Department of Global Health, Rollins School of Public Health, and a Faculty Fellow at the Emory Ethics Center. David was appointed Assistant Professor (Status-Only) in IHPME in 2023. He has served on expert advisory committees for the World Health Organization, the Mectizan Donation Program, and the International Trachoma Initiative. His current work focuses on compassion and ethics in global health practice.