Last week, Jay Bhattacharya named a pediatric neurosurgeon with a $95 million budget to oversee NIH’s global health portfolio. Dr. Steven Schiff took the helm of the Fogarty International Center on June 4, 2026—and his playbook reads more like an engineering manifesto than a traditional global health résumé.
Schiff is the Harvey and Kate Cushing Professor of Neurosurgery at Yale, with secondary appointments in epidemiology and electrical and computer engineering. That triple threat matters: he founded Penn State’s Center for Neural Engineering and co-developed Yale’s Center for Global Neurosurgery. His nearly 250 publications span neural control engineering, sustainable health engineering, and a specific bacterial infection most clinicians have never heard of.
The Underdiagnosed Infection That Caught NIH’s Attention
Schiff’s lab identified neonatal paenibacilliosis—a severe infant brain infection caused by Paenibacillus thiaminolyticus. The disease is increasingly recognized as an underdiagnosed cause of neonatal sepsis in resource-limited settings. More alarming: it has recently appeared in infants in the United States. That’s the kind of concrete problem that drives Schiff’s work. He’s not a theoretical modeler; he found a pathogen that kills babies and linked it to a specific organism.
Stepping back, his appointment signals NIH’s intent to push predictive personalized public health—a concept he helped pioneer. The two NIH Director’s awards (Pioneer in 2015, Transformative in 2018) funded his work on sustainable control of infant infections in the developing world. That’s not abstract: those grants paid for field studies, genomic surveillance, and low-cost interventions that scale.
What the Fogarty Job Actually Entails
Fogarty International Center coordinates collaborations between U.S. and foreign investigators, trains future global health scientists, and manages about $95 million in grants each year. Schiff replaces Peter Kilmarx, who served as acting director since early 2025. The center isn’t a basic-science institute—it’s a matchmaker and funder for international partnerships. Schiff’s dual role as NIH associate director for international research gives him a seat at the table for cross-agency global health decisions.
His background on the FDA’s Medical Devices Advisory Committee and his fellowship in five professional societies (AAAS, American College of Surgeons, American Association of Neurological Surgery, American Physical Society, American Epilepsy Society) suggest he understands both the regulatory grind and the physics of medical devices.
Why This Appointment Matters Beyond the Beltway
Schiff’s work on predictive personalized public health isn’t buzzword salad. He demonstrated that you can use low-cost sensors, machine learning, and epidemiological models to target interventions before outbreaks hit—specifically in settings that lack cold chains, microscopes, or even reliable electricity. That engineering mindset, applied to neonatal sepsis, is exactly what global health needs more of.
Expect Fogarty’s portfolio to tilt toward data-driven, sustainable health engineering under Schiff. The neonatal paenibacilliosis work will likely expand, and new partnerships with engineering schools and tech companies will follow. Schiff’s next move: turn his $95 million into tools that don’t require a clean room.
Source: NIH Selects Dr. Steven Schiff as Director of Fogarty International Center, Associate Director for International Research
Domain: nih.gov
Comments load interactively on the live page.