As a 2012 course faculty member, Randall M. Packard was chair and William H. Welch Professor of the History of Medicine at the Institute of the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University. He has a joint appointment in the History of Medicine at the University of Wisconsin.

Prior to his time at Hopkins, he was the Asa Griggs Candler Professor of African History at Emory University and professor of International Health at the Rollins School of Public Health. He has also held numerous professorships of history throughout his career and has written extensively on the history of disease, public health, and medicine. He is author of The Making of a Tropical Disease: A Short History of Malaria (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007) and editor of the Bulletin of the History of Medicine, a leading journal in its field on the social, cultural, and scientific aspects of the history of medicine worldwide. As of 2012, he has also working on a global history of dengue fever, examining the emergence and global spread of dengue, with special attention to the complex set of biological, environmental, social, and economic conditions that facilitated its rapid global expansion during the last decades of the 20th century.

He earned a bachelor’s degree at Wesleyan University and a Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin.