Les Roberts (epidemiologist)

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Les Roberts (epidemiologist) (b.1961 - ) was the first winner of the Center for Disease Control's Paul C. Schnitker Award for contributions to Global Health. He became prominent in the news just before the 2004 U.S. presidential election, for his study estimating that 100,000 Iraqi civilians had been killed in the Iraq war, at a time when official U.S. government estimates were much lower. In October 2006, an expanded followup study was released that gave a point estimate of 654,965 deaths having occurred, within a 95 percent confidence interval from 392,979 to 942,636. U.S. President George W. Bush dismissed the new study, saying the approach had been "pretty well discredited", without explaining how. However, numerous statisticians supported the study.

Roberts is the lead author of the earlier 2004 study, co-authored with four others, and was the lead investigator in the field. The study, titled "Mortality before and after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: cluster sample survey" was published in The Lancet, a prestigious peer-reviewed journal. See Lancet surveys of casualties of the Iraq War for a detailed discussion. Those results have since been confirmed by a study released by the Iraqi Government. Roberts' first important contribution came from a study among refugees in Malawi conducted for the United Nations regarding the effects of narrow-necked water containers that showed most water contamination came from the hands of refugees. Since that study, narrow-necked water containers have become a standard component of humanitarian relief programs.

Roberts campaigned for office in 2006, running in the Democratic primary for the U.S. House of Representatives seat of the 24th Congressional District in Chenango County, New York. He withdrew from the running on May 17 and endorsed the remaining Democratic candidate in the race who was later elected.

Roberts was Director of Health Policy at the International Rescue Committee. In 1994 he worked in Rwanda for the World Health Organization^{[citation needed]}, and performed a similar study to estimate the number of Rwandan refugees. In 2000, he performed a similar study which estimated 1.7 million deaths due to the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo [1]. This study met with widespread acceptance when published [2], and resulted and was cited in a U.N. Security Council resolution that all foreign armies must leave Congo, a United Nations request for $140 million in aid, and a pledge by the US State Department for an additional $10 million in aid.

In 2008, Roberts is an Associate Clinical Professor of Population and Family Health at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health.^[1]

Roberts obtained a Ph.D. in environmental engineering from Johns Hopkins University in 1992, and has been a regular lecturer there. Roberts did post-graduate fellowship work with the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. He obtained a masters degree in public health from Tulane University in 1986, and an undergraduate degree in physics at St. Lawrence University in 1983. He grew up in Onondaga, New York, and graduated from Westhill Senior High School in 1979.