Anat Gesser-Edelsburg

Anat Gesser-Edelsburg, PhD, is a tenured Full Professor and Head of the School of Public Health, Faculty of Social Welfare and Health Sciences, at the University of Haifa, where she previously served as Vice Dean for Teaching. She is the Founding Director of the Health and Risk Communication Lab.

Professor Gesser-Edelsburg serves as Deputy Editor of Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness, Associate Editor of BMC Public Health and Frontiers in Public Health, and Academic Editor of PLOS ONE.

Her research focuses on health and risk communication, particularly how scientific evidence, uncertainty, expertise, and competing interpretations are communicated and translated into public health policy and practice. Her work examines trust, risk perception, misinformation, and public responses to health and crisis communication, particularly in emerging infectious diseases and vaccination. Another major strand of her research applies Positive Deviance, social marketing, and participatory approaches to complex public health challenges and sustainable behavioral and organizational change.

She has published extensively in international peer-reviewed journals and co-authored several books, including Risk Communication and Infectious Diseases in an Age of Digital Media, published by Routledge.

Professor Gesser-Edelsburg has led and collaborated on numerous competitive national and international research projects funded by the European Commission, Israeli government ministries, the Israel National Institute for Health Policy Research, and other organizations, including the European Commission-funded TELL ME and ASSET projects.

She has supervised numerous master’s and doctoral students and postdoctoral researchers and has served as a Research Fellow at the School of Public Health, University of Illinois Chicago. 

Professor Gesser-Edelsburg received her BA, summa cum laude, and PhD, with Distinction, from Tel Aviv University. She conducted postdoctoral research at the Minerva Center for Human Rights, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, as a Vidal Angel Postdoctoral Fellow for Research Against Hate and Bigotry.