Frederick L. Dunn (b. 1928) was a pioneer scholar-physician in the field of international health and anthropology in public health, formerly known as "tropical medicine,” who worked primarily in the San Francisco Bay Area and in Southeast Asia. His research spans issues of global health, behavioral research, medical anthropology, epidemiology, and infectious disease. Dunn advocated an interdisciplinary approach that has altered the course of research in global health. He was instrumental in identifying and promoting the importance of human behavioral research in understanding infectious disease. Dunn’s theory of 'casual assemblages' takes into account the social, political, cultural, and economic factors in the spread of communicable diseases within populations.

Dunn worked closely with the World Health Organization throughout his career, beginning in the 1960s. He served as a physician-anthropologist consultant for the organization and was involved with identifying research and training needs in tropical disease. His research has been widely published from the 1950s-1990s.

Frederick L. Dunn was born in 1928 into a family well acquainted with sciences. His father was a well-known psychiatrist and his extended family included other physicians and scientists. Dunn attended Harvard University as an undergraduate anthropology major and returned to begin Harvard Medical School in 1952. As a medical student in 1955, he participated in the American Himalayan Expedition in Pakistan as the team physician. This expedition marked Dunn’s first experience with communicable disease among the local population in a developing country.

Following medical school graduation, Dunn completed postgraduate clinical training in Seattle through a program associated with the University of Washington. He then began a two year service in the Center for Disease Control's (CDC) Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS), beginning in 1957, in Louisiana and East Pakistan.

In 1960, Dunn enrolled in a course at the London School of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene and received the Diploma in Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. Through the course Dunn met J. Ralph Audy from the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) who proceeded to recruit Dunn for UCSF. Dunn officially joined the Department of Medicine faculty in September of 1960 and began working in Audy’s tropical disease laboratory.

In 1962, Dunn traveled to Malaysia to work in the International Center for Medical Research and Training (ICMRT) program. During the 1960s and 1970s Dunn spent over a total of seven years living, working, and researching infectious disease in Malaysia. His research included primate malaria, parasitic diseases among indigenous groups, and the group Orang Asli in particular.

Dunn helped to form the country’s first medical anthropology program—a joint initiative between UCSF and University of California, Berkeley—in 1969.

In 1973 Dunn completed his doctoral dissertation in anthropology at the University of Malaya. Dunn formally retired in 1993 at which point he had been serving as a faculty member in the UCSF-UCB joint medical anthropology program.