Interests:
Reading American fiction and watching foreign movies.

Activities:
Hanging out with my teenage children for as long as they'll let me.

Favorite books:
Maughm's Of Human Bondage, Styron's Sophie's Choice, Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden, and Brookner's Hotel Du Lac

Favorite movies:
A Brief Vacation, The Lacemaker, And Now My Love, They Shoot Horses Don't They, The Godfather (Psychiatrists would probably have a field day trying to figure out how these movies fit together.)

Favorite TV show:
Family Guy

Favorite quote:
"It would be a very quiet forest indeed if the only birds that sang were those that sang best."

professional background
Paul A. Offit, M.D., is the Chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases and the Director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. In addition, Dr. Offit is the Maurice R. Hilleman Professor of Vaccinology and a Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. He is a recipient of many awards including the J. Edmund Bradley Prize for Excellence in Pediatrics from the University of Maryland Medical School, the Young Investigator Award in Vaccine Development from the Infectious Disease Society of America, and a Research Career Development Award from the National Institutes of Health.

Dr. Offit has published more than 130 papers in medical and scientific journals in the areas of rotavirus-specific immune responses and vaccine safety. He is also the co-inventor of the rotavirus vaccine, RotaTeq, recommended for universal use in infants by the CDC; for this achievement Dr. Offit received the Gold Medal from the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, the Jonas Salk Medal from the Association for Infection Control and Epidemiology, the Luigi Mastroianni Clinical Innovator and the William Osler Patient Oriented Research Awards from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, and the Charles Mérieux Award for Achievement in Vaccinology and Immunology from the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases.

Dr. Offit was a member of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is a founding advisory board member of the Autism Science Foundation, and is the author of five books titled Vaccines: What You Should Know (Wiley, 2003, 3rd Edition), Breaking the Antibiotic Habit (Wiley, 1999), The Cutter Incident: How America's First Polio Vaccine Led to Today's Growing Vaccine Crisis (Yale University Press, 2005), Vaccinated: One Man's Quest to Defeat the World's Deadliest Diseases (HarperCollins, 2007), and Autism's False Prophets: Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the Search for a Cure (Columbia University Press, 2008).