Anat Gesser-Edelsburg

Anat Gesser-Edelsburg, PhD is a Full Professor (tenured), Head of School of Public Health, Faculty of Social Welfare and Health Sciences, and the Founding Director of the Health and Risk Communication Lab (formerly center) at the University of Haifa.

She is Deputy Editor of Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness, Associate Editor of BMC Public Health, Frontiers in Public Health, and Academic Editor of PLOS ONE.

Her most recent book Risk Communication and Infectious Diseases in an Age of Digital Media was published by Routledge Studies in Public Health.

Anat has won or collaborated in many research grants, among them TellMe and Asset, two European Commission funded research grants.

Anat has a BA (Summa Cum Laude, 1997) and PhD (With Distinction, 2002) both from the Faculty of the Arts, Tel-Aviv University. She has completed her Post-Doc research (2006) being awarded the Vidal Angel Postdoctoral Fellowship for Research Against Hate and Bigotry at the Minerva Center for Human Rights, The Faculty of Law, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Her areas of research include health and risk communication, positive deviance, social marketing, persuasive communication, health-promotion programs, entertainment-education, mixed methods research, and qualitative research. Anat investigate a variety of health-related issues, including emerging infectious disease (EID) communication, vaccination compliance, drugs and alcohol abuse, drinking-and-driving, sex education, nutrition, hospital-acquired infections prevention, preventing unintentional childhood injuries among the Bedouins in southern Israel, and health and risk communication surrounding COVID-19.