Edward L. Schor

Edward L. Schor, M.D. is Medical Director for Family and Community Health and Medical Director for Health Policy for the Iowa Department of Public Health. In those capacity he is responsible for guiding clinical public health programs, including those providing maternal and child health and family planning services, and for helping formulate health policies and initiating new programs. He is a general pediatrician with clinical expertise in behavioral and received post-doctoral training in social and behavioral sciences. He has published extensively on the health of children in foster care, and on the family and social context of child health. He has a special interest in the social determinants of child health and family functioning, and has done research and taught on child health status assessment and on the family and how it affects children’s health. He is currently completing a population-based, household survey of the health of children and family in Iowa, and is developing a family strengths self-assessment for parents of newborn infants in that state.

He is editor of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ book, Caring for Your School-Age Child, past chairman of that organization’s Committee on Early Childhood, Adoption, and Dependent Care, and presently chairs its national Task Force on the Family. He was the founding medical director of the Chesapeake Health Plan, an HMO for children in foster care. Subsequently, he served as Chief of the Division of General Pediatrics at the University of New Mexico, Director of programs in medical education and functional outcomes and well-being of health care for the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation in Menlo Park, California, and Director of the Functional Outcomes Program at The Health Institute at the New England Medical Center in Boston. He has been a member of the faculties of several major university medical schools including Johns Hopkins, the University of New Mexico, Stanford, Tufts, Harvard, and the University of Iowa, and also the schools of public health at Johns Hopkins and Harvard Universities; he serves as adjunct faculty in sociology at Iowa State University. He serves on the editorial boards of the journals Pediatrics, The Journal of the Ambulatory Pediatrics Association, and Behavioral and Developmental Pediatrics.