Elizabeth Fontham

Last updated

Elizabeth Terrell Hobgood "Terry" Fontham [1] is an American cancer epidemiologist, public health researcher, and founding dean of the Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center New Orleans School of Public Health.

Contents

Education

Fontham received her undergraduate degree from Louisiana State University, her MPH in Epidemiology from the Tulane University School of Public Health in 1978, and her doctorate in Public Health Epidemiology in 1983, also from the Tulane University School of Public Health. [2]

Career

Fontham became the associate director of cancer prevention and control at the Stanley S. Scott Cancer Center at Louisiana State University (LSU) in 1996. Also that year, she became a professor of pathology at the LSU Health Sciences Center School of Medicine. From 1998 to 2003, she was chairman of the Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center's Department of Public Health and Preventive Medicine, and remains a professor in this department. She is also the founding dean of the LSU Health Sciences Center School of Public Health. [3] [4] She directed this department's epidemiology program from 2003 to 2004. [5] In 2008, she was named president of the American Cancer Society, becoming the first non-physician to hold this position in the organization's history. Prior to this appointment, she served as a member of the National Cancer Institute's Board of Scientific Counselors. [1]

Research

Fontham is known for her research in cancer epidemiology, such as the link between tobacco, diet, and cancer. For example, she led the first case-control study in the United States that found that passive smoking increased the risk of lung cancer. [6] [1] The tobacco industry responded by trying to gain access to the raw data from the study from University of Southern California researchers in court so as to cast doubt on its results. [7]

Honors and awards

Fontham has received the Alton Ochsner Award Relating Tobacco and Health, the C.L. Brown Award for Leadership Excellence in Tobacco Prevention; the Leadership and Distinguished Service Award of the American College of Epidemiology; and the Pfizer Award for Excellence in Research, Education and Patient Care. [8]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tulane University School of Medicine</span> Educational establishment in New Orleans, Louisiana

The Tulane University School of Medicine is located in New Orleans, Louisiana, United States and is a part of Tulane University. The school is located in the Medical District of the New Orleans Central Business District.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Passive smoking</span> Inhalation of tobacco smoke by persons other than the intended active smoker

Passive smoking is the inhalation of tobacco smoke, called secondhand smoke (SHS), or environmental tobacco smoke (ETS), by persons other than the intended "active" smoker. It occurs when tobacco smoke enters an environment, causing its inhalation by people within that environment. Exposure to secondhand tobacco smoke causes disease, disability, and death. The health risks of secondhand smoke are a matter of scientific consensus. These risks have been a major motivation for smoke-free laws in workplaces and indoor public places, including restaurants, bars and night clubs, as well as some open public spaces.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health</span> Public health institution

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences</span>

Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences is one of the three medical universities in Tehran, the capital of Iran. It began in 1961 with the establishment of the Schools of Medicine and Dentistry. Following the merging of some of the treatment and educational units and organizations affiliated to the then Ministry of Health and “Melli University” in 1986, Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences began its activities independently.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Health effects of tobacco</span> Circumstances, mechanisms, and factors of tobacco consumption on human health

Tobacco use has predominantly negative effects on human health and concern about health effects of tobacco has a long history. Research has focused primarily on cigarette smoking.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Devra Davis</span> American epidemiologist and writer

Devra Lee Davis is an American epidemiologist, toxicologist, and author of three books about environmental hazards. She was founding director of the Center for Environmental Oncology at the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute, and is a former professor of epidemiology at University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health. She has served on several governmental and non-governmental organizations, conducting research and advocacy into effects of pesticides, asbestos, and wireless radiation on human health, especially cancers.

Ernst Ludwig Wynder was an American epidemiology and public health researcher who studied the health effects of smoking tobacco. His and Evarts Ambrose Graham's joint publication of "Tobacco Smoking as a Possible Etiologic Factor in Bronchiogenic Carcinoma: A Study of 684 Proved Cases" appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association. It was one of the first major scientific publications to identify smoking as a contributory cause of lung cancer.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine</span>

The Tulane School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine is part of Tulane University, located in New Orleans, in the U.S. state of Louisiana.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Joseph W. Cullen</span> American cancer researcher

Joseph W. Cullen was an American cancer prevention and rehabilitation researcher and briefly director of the AMC Cancer Research Center (1989-1990). He previously worked at the VA Hospital in Maryland (1968-1973), the National Institutes of Health (1973), the National Cancer Institute (NCI), and the Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center (1976-1982), holding high-level positions such as division director at several. He was a coordinator, creator, and researcher for the Smoking Tobacco and Cancer Program at the NCI, the largest anti-smoking campaign in the world at that time. Cullen wrote more than 90 publications in his lifetime, including four books.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dimitrios Trichopoulos</span>

Dimitrios Trichopoulos, was a Mediterranean Diet expert and tobacco harms researcher. He was Vincent L. Gregory Professor of Cancer Prevention and Professor of Epidemiology, and a past chair of the Department of Epidemiology, in the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston.

Geoffrey C. Kabat is an American epidemiologist, cancer researcher, and author. He has been on the faculty of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and State University of New York, Stony Brook. He is mainly known for the discredited BMJ study funded by the tobacco industry, that failed to find an association between secondhand smoke and health problems. He has consistently disputed the health risks of second-hand smoke by casting doubt on the scientific consensus that secondhand smoke causes lung cancer, which is estimated to cause about 21400 deaths per year worldwide.

Paul Kieran Whelton is an Irish-born American physician and scientist who has contributed to the fields of hypertension and kidney disease epidemiology. He also mentored several public health leaders including the deans of the schools of public health at Johns Hopkins and Columbia. He currently serves as the Show Chwan Health Care System Endowed Chair in Global Public Health and a Clinical Professor in the Department of Epidemiology at the Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine. He is the founding director of the Welch Center for Prevention, Epidemiology, and Clinical Research at Johns Hopkins University.

Takeshi Hirayama was a Japanese cancer epidemiologist and anti-tobacco activist who served as the chief of the epidemiology division at the National Cancer Center in Tokyo from 1965 until 1985. He has been credited with publishing the first study linking passive smoking to lung cancer, and also conducted research on the relationship between certain dietary factors and cancer.

Pelayo Correa is a Colombian pathologist.

Cornelia "Neli" Ulrich is executive director of the Comprehensive Cancer Center at Huntsman Cancer Institute (HCI), Jon M. and Karen Huntsman Presidential Professor in Cancer Research, and former Division Chief of Cancer Population Sciences in the Department of Population Health Sciences at the University of Utah. Ulrich oversees HCI's academic consortium of nearly 200 cancer research teams. She leads efforts to advance the impact of HCI's research in laboratory, clinical and population science, with the goal of improving cancer prevention and treatment. Prior to joining HCI, she was the director and department head of preventive oncology at the National Center of Tumor Diseases (NCT) and German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) in Heidelberg. During this time, she also held a Professorship at the DKFZ and University of Heidelberg. From 1993 until 2009, Ulrich was a Member of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and Professor in Epidemiology at the University of Washington in Seattle.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo</span> American epidemiologist and physician

Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo is an American epidemiologist and physician. She is the 17th Editor in Chief of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) and the JAMA Network. She is Professor of Epidemiology and Biostatistics and the Lee Goldman, MD Endowed Professor of Medicine at University of California, San Francisco. She is a general internist and attending physician at San Francisco General Hospital.

Cheryl Ann Marie Anderson is an American epidemiologist. Anderson is a professor at and founding Dean of the University of California San Diego Herbert Wertheim School of Public Health and Human Longevity Science. Anderson's research focus is on nutrition and chronic disease prevention in under-served human populations.

Xifeng Wu is a Chinese-American cancer epidemiologist known for her cohort studies designed to discover the causes of cancer. She has been Dean of the School of Public Health of Zhejiang University since March 2019. She previously served as Director of the Center for Public Health and Translational Genomics and the Betty B. Marcus Chair in Cancer Prevention at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center until she was forced to resign in January 2019, as part of the Trump administration's push to counter Chinese influence in American research according to Bloomberg Businessweek.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Joan Bailey-Wilson</span> American statistical geneticist

Joan Ellen Bailey-Wilson is an American statistical geneticist. She is a senior investigator and co-chief of the Computational and Statistical Genomic Branch of the National Human Genome Research Institute.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lucile Adams-Campbell</span> American epidemiologist

Lucile L. Adams-Campbell is the first African-American woman to receive a PhD in epidemiology in the United States. She serves as the Professor of Oncology at Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center and Associate Director for Minority Health at the Georgetown University Medical Center. She is a Fellow of the National Academy of Medicine and the Washington DC Hall of Fame.

References

  1. 1 2 3 Pope, John (20 November 2008). "LSU Dean Elizabeth Fontham named head of American Cancer Society". NOLA.com. Retrieved 6 March 2016.
  2. ↑ "Elizabeth Fontham". LSU Health Sciences Center New Orleans. Retrieved 6 March 2016.
  3. ↑ "Announcement of Dr. Culbertson becoming dean" (PDF). LSU Health Sciences Center School of Public Health. Archived from the original (PDF) on 10 March 2016. Retrieved 6 March 2016.
  4. ↑ "Elizabeth Fontham". IPRI website. Retrieved 6 March 2016.
  5. ↑ "Elizabeth Fontham CV" (PDF). LSU website. Retrieved 6 March 2016.
  6. ↑ Fontham, Elizabeth T. H. (8 June 1994). "Environmental Tobacco Smoke and Lung Cancer in Nonsmoking Women". JAMA. 271 (22): 1752–9. doi:10.1001/jama.1994.03510460044031. PMID   8196118.
  7. ↑ Levin, Myron (4 October 1999). "Big Tobacco Pursues Secondhand Smoke Data". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved 6 March 2016.
  8. ↑ "Elizabeth Fontham". Louisiana Public Square. Retrieved 6 March 2016.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.