Interviewees

Michael R. Greenberg, Ph.D., is a Distinguished Professor in the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers. Born in the Bronx in 1943, he grew up in the Bronx and Yonkers and attended public schools. He attended Hunter College, where he played baseball and earned his B.A. For graduate school, he studied at Columbia, where he received his M.A. in urban geography and Ph.D. in environmental and medical geography. In the interview, he recalls being a graduate student at Columbia during the turbulent years of the late 1960s. After beginning his career at Columbia, he joined the faculty at Livingston College in 1971. He discusses the early years of Livingston and the development of the urban planning department. Over the course of his career, he has specialized in environmental health, environmental planning and management and risk analysis and has written more than thirty books and over three hundred articles. He has been a member of numerous National Research Council Committees, including those focusing on the disposal of the U.S. chemical weapons stockpile, chemical waste management, and the degradation of the U.S. physical infrastructure. He has served on advisory boards for several governmental departments and agencies, including the Department of Energy, the Environmental Protection Agency and the New Jersey Commission on Cancer Research. He served as the editor-in-chief of Risk Analysis and as associate editor for environmental health for the American Journal of Public Health. He served as the Associate Dean of the Bloustein School from 2000 to 2017 and as Interim Dean in 2017-'18. Dr. Greenberg is the 2019 recipient of the Gorenstein Memorial Award. In the oral history, he examines changes at Rutgers over the course of the pandemic, as well as public policy issues concerning COVID-19 and resulting health disparities.