Speaker biographies

John E. Calfee is a resident scholar at AEI. He previously worked on the economics of consumer protection—including advertising and marketing, the tort liability system, tobacco, and other topics—at the Bureau of Economics at the Federal Trade Commission. He has taught marketing and consumer behavior at the business schools of the University of Maryland at College Park and Boston University and spent a year as a visiting senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Mr. Calfee’s academic articles and opinion pieces cover a variety of topics, including tort liability, advertising and information, Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulation, and the pharmaceutical market. His op-eds have run in the Wall Street Journal, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Los Angeles Times, and numerous other newspapers and magazines. His recent scholarly publications have appeared in Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics, Health Affairs, and the Supreme Court Economic Review. He has published three short books: Fear of Persuasion: A New Perspective on Advertising and Regulation (AEI Press, 1997); Prices, Markets, and the Pharmaceutical Revolution (AEI Press, 2000); and Biotechnology and the Patent System: Balancing Innovation and Property Rights, with Claude Barfield (AEI Press, 2007). He has also testified before Congress and federal agencies on various topics, including alcohol advertising; biodefense vaccine research; international drug prices; the Vioxx episode; and, most recently, FDA oversight of drug safety.

Roy Richard Grinker is a professor of anthropology, human sciences, and international affairs at The George Washington University. He is currently completing the first ever prevalence study of autism in Korea, to be published in late 2008. Mr. Grinker has published books and articles on the ethnic conflicts in central Africa, the intellectual history of African Studies, and north-south Korean relations. He has conducted research in the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Korea, Swaziland, South Africa, India, and the United States. His book, Unstrange Minds: Remapping the World of Autism (Basic Books, 2007), received a Victor Turner Prize from the American Anthropological Association, was selected by Library Journal for its list of “30 Best Books of 2007,” and received a 2008 KEN Award from the National Alliance for Mental Illness for “Outstanding Literary Contribution to a Better Understanding of Mental Illness.”

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. Dr. Offit is also 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 on rotavirus-specific immune responses and vaccine safety. He is also the coinventor of the rotavirus vaccine RotaTeq, for which he received the Gold Medal from the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and the Jonas Salk Medal from the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology. Dr. Offit has served on the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and is the coauthor of four books: Vaccines: What You Should Know (Wiley, 2003, third 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 most recently, Autism's False Prophets (Columbia University Press, 2008).