Frank A. von Hippel

Frank A. von Hippel is a professor of environmental health sciences in the Mel & Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health and the lead of the “One Health” research initiative at the University of Arizona. Frank was born and raised in Alaska, received an A.B. in biology at Dartmouth College in 1989, and a Ph.D. in integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley in 1996. He taught for Columbia University (1996-1999), the University of Alaska Anchorage (2000-2016), and Northern Arizona University (2016-2021) before moving to the University of Arizona in 2021.  

Frank has taught field courses in over twenty countries, and conducted research in the Americas, Africa and Australia. He conducts research at the nexus of ecotoxicology, mechanisms of toxicity, and health disparities, with a focus on Indigenous populations. Frank uses locally occurring wildlife and laboratory animals as models for human exposure and disease, and he employs a Community Based Participatory Research (CBPR) approach. Frank’s research has been widely covered in the press, including The New York Times, National Public Radio, The Economist, the BBC, and many other media outlets.  

Frank is the author of The Chemical Age (University of Chicago Press, 2020; https://frankvonhippel.github.io/pubs.html) and he is the creator and host of the Science History Podcast (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/science-history-podcast/id1325288920). From 2015-2018, he served as Associate Editor of the Elsevier journal Environmental Pollution (Impact Factor: 6.792), where he now serves on the editorial board. He is a member of the Board of Directors of the Science Communication Network (http://sciencecommunicationnetwork.org/), which brings media attention to environmental health research. Frank has mentored minority students in research throughout his career, with a focus on Native American and Latino students, and received numerous awards for this mentorship, including the “baleen award” of the Alaska Native Science and Engineering Program and the University of Alaska Faculty Exemplar Award for long-term mentoring of undergraduate research.