Neal Baer

Neal A. Baer, M.D. is a Harvard-trained physician, practicing pediatrician and award-winning television writer and producer. Since 2000, he has served as executive producer of the NBC series Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. He was previously Executive Producer of ER. He also has served as an adjunct professor at USC, teaching in the area of health communications, health promotion and disease prevention, and sex education.

Baer graduated magna cum laude with a B.A. in political science from Colorado College. He holds Masters degrees from Harvard Graduate School of Education and from Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences in Sociology. He graduated from Harvard Medical School and completed his internship in pediatrics at Childrens Hospital, Los Angeles. He received the Jerry L. Pettis Memorial Scholarship from the American Medical Association as the most outstanding medical student who has contributed to promoting a better understanding of medicine in the media. The American Association for the Advancement of Science selected him as a Mass Media Fellow.

Baer serves on the boards of numerous health care organizations, including the Venice Family Clinic, Advocates for Youth, Children Now and Physicians for Social Responsibility. He has worked in South Africa and Mozambique since 2006, teaching photography to mothers with HIV and to AIDS orphans so that they can tell the world their own stories. He also has presented locally and internationally to medical and public health students and faculty, television producers and others on such topics as Utilizing the Media to Effect Social Change; Storytelling and Social Change; Domestic and International Policies Affecting HIV and AIDS; Teens, Sex and TV; and Health Messages in Primetime Television.

As a senior fellow, Baer works with the Institute for Photographic Empowerment, which he co-founded, to link photographic storytelling projects around the world and to make that work available to NGOs and policymakers.