David Hunter | |
---|---|
Born | London, U.K. |
Nationality | British, Australian, American |
Citizenship | Australia, U.K., U.S.A. |
Education | Harvard School of Public Health |
Alma mater | University of Sydney Medical School |
Known for | Dean of the Faculty at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health |
Children | 1 |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Epidemiology, Oncology |
Institutions | Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, University of Oxford |
David John Hunter AC is an Australian epidemiologist and the Richard Doll Professor of Epidemiology and Medicine at Oxford Population Health. [1] He was previously a professor in the Department of Epidemiology and the Department of Nutritionof Harvard University. He was associate epidemiologist at the Channing Laboratory, Brigham and Women's Hospital, where he was involved with the programs in breast cancer, cancer epidemiology, and cancer genetics research teams. [2]
Hunter directs the Translational Epidemiology Unit (TEU) at Oxford Population Health, and leads a collaborative project between Oxford and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
David Hunter was born in London, England and while a young child moved with his family to Sydney, Australia, where he earned his medical degree (MBBS) in 1982. He then moved to the United States for graduate study at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, where he earned both a master's degree (MPH, 1985) and a doctorate (ScD, 1988) in public health.
Hunter spent 33 years at Harvard where he was Acting Dean of the Faculty and before that Dean for Academic Affairs at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Professor of Medicine at the Harvard Medical School in Boston. He is Vincent L. Gregory Professor in Cancer Prevention, Emeritus.
As of 2023 [update] he is Richard Doll Professor of Epidemiology and Medicine at the University of Oxford. [1]
In 2021, he was elected a Fellow of The Academy of Medical Sciences. [3]
Hunter's principal career research interests are the aetiology of various cancers, particularly breast, colorectal, and skin cancers, and prostate cancer in men. He was an investigator on the Nurses' Health Study, a long-running cohort of 121,000 U.S. women, and was project director for the Nurses’ Health Study II, a cohort of 116,000 women followed since 1989. His focus is on genetic susceptibility to these cancers, and gene-environment interactions. This work was originally based in subcohorts of the Study and the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study of approximately 33,000 women and 18,000 men who have given a blood sample that can be used for DNA analysis.
Until 2012, Hunter was co-chair of the Breast and Prostate Cancer Cohort Consortium and co-director of the Cancer Genetic Markers of Susceptibility (CGEMS) Special Initiative of the National Cancer Institute (NCI). These projects are large collaborative consortia in order to obtain the necessarily large sample sizes and to assess consistency of results across studies.
In the 1980s and 1990s, he collaborated with investigators in Kenya and Tanzania on early studies of HIV transmission, and subsequently he collaborated on studies of nutritional aspects of AIDS progression as they relate to child survival in affected populations. He co-edited a series of articles on global health which were published in the New England Journal of Medicine, for which he also serves as a statistical editor.
In 2017, Hunter moved to the University of Oxford as the Richard Doll Professor of Epidemiology and Medicine in the Nuffield Department of Population Health (now the Oxford Population Health) and as a Governing Board Fellow of Green Templeton College. He directs a Unit focused on translating disease risk information into population health and clinical practice.
As of 2023 [update] he is Chief Science Advisor to Our Future Health, a major initiative of the UK Government. [4] In 2021, he was elected as a Fellow by distinction of the UK Faculty of Public Health, and elected as a Fellow of the UK Academy of Medical Sciences.
Hunter was appointed as a Companion of the Order of Australia in the 2023 King's Birthday Honours for "eminent service to medicine as an epidemiologist, particularly in relation to disease prevention and early detection, and to the aetiology of breast, colorectal, prostate and skin cancers". [5]
Epidemiology is the study and analysis of the distribution, patterns and determinants of health and disease conditions in a defined population.
Sir William Richard Shaboe Doll was a British physician who became an epidemiologist in the mid-20th century and made important contributions to that discipline. He was a pioneer in research linking smoking to health problems. With Ernst Wynder, Bradford Hill and Evarts Graham, he was credited with being the first to prove that smoking increased the risk of lung cancer and heart disease.
The Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health is the public health school of Harvard University, located in the Longwood Medical Area of Boston, Massachusetts. The school grew out of the Harvard-MIT School for Health Officers, the nation's first graduate training program in population health, which was founded in 1913 and then became the Harvard School of Public Health in 1922.
The Nurses' Health Study is a series of prospective studies that examine epidemiology and the long-term effects of nutrition, hormones, environment, and nurses' work-life on health and disease development. The studies have been among the largest investigations into risk factors for major chronic diseases ever conducted. The Nurses' Health Studies have led to many insights on health and well-being, including cancer prevention, cardiovascular disease, and type 2 diabetes. They have included clinicians, epidemiologists, and statisticians at the Channing Laboratory, Harvard Medical School, Harvard School of Public Health, and several Harvard-affiliated hospitals, including Brigham and Women's Hospital, Dana–Farber Cancer Institute, Children's Hospital Boston, and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.
Dietary factors are recognized as having a significant effect on the risk of cancers, with different dietary elements both increasing and reducing risk. Diet and obesity may be related to up to 30–35% of cancer deaths, while physical inactivity appears to be related to 7% risk of cancer occurrence.
Dame Valerie Beral AC DBE FRS FRCOG FMedSci was an Australian-born British epidemiologist, academic and a preeminent specialist in breast cancer epidemiology. She was Professor of Epidemiology, a Fellow of Green Templeton College, Oxford and was the Head of the Cancer Epidemiology Unit at the University of Oxford and Cancer Research UK from 1989.
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