Eric Toner

Professional Profile Dr. Toner is a Senior Scholar with the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and a Senior Scientist in the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Department of Environmental Health and Engineering. He is an internist and emergency physician. His primary areas of interest are healthcare preparedness for catastrophic events, pandemic influenza, and medical response to bioterrorism. He is Managing Editor of the online newsletter Clinicians’ Biosecurity News and is an Associate Editor of the journal Health Security (formerly Biosecurity and Bioterrorism), the leading peer-reviewed journal in this field. Dr. Toner has authored scores of scholarly papers and government reports on healthcare and pandemic preparedness, and he has organized numerous meetings of national leaders on the topics of hospital preparedness, pandemic influenza, emerging infectious diseases, mass casualty disasters, biosecurity, biosurveillance, and nuclear preparedness. He has spoken at many national and international conferences on a range of biosecurity topics and appeared on a number of high-profile national television and news features on pandemic flu and bioterrorism preparedness. He has been the principal investigator of several US government–funded projects to assess and advance healthcare preparedness. Dr. Toner has served on a number of national working groups and committees, including the Institute of Medicine’s Forum on Medical and Public Health Preparedness for Catastrophic Events. Dr. Toner has been involved in hospital disaster planning since the mid-1980s. Prior to joining the Center, he was Medical Director of Disaster Preparedness at St. Joseph Medical Center in Towson, Maryland, where he practiced emergency medicine for 23 years. In 2003, he spearheaded the creation of a coalition of disaster preparedness personnel from the 5 Baltimore County hospitals, the health department, and the Office of Emergency Management. During this time, he also headed a large emergency medicine group practice and co-founded and managed a large primary care group practice and an independent urgent care center. Dr. Toner received his BA and MD degrees from the University of Virginia. He trained in internal medicine at the Medical College of Virginia.