Notes on People And Quotable Quote

Some of the latest awards, appointments, and honors received by colleagues in epidemiology and public health are described below. We also include a quote about epidemiologists as canaries! To submit a favorite quote or news item about someone you know, send the information to epimon@aol.com

Awardee: James Robins, Harvard University Professor of Epidemiology, of the 2013 Nathan Mantel Lifetime Achievement award in statistics and epidemiology given by the Statistics in Epidemiology section of the American Statistical Association. The award was given in Montreal in August.
 

Appointed: Chesley Richards, as the director of the Office of Surveillance, Epidemiology, and Laboratory Services at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Prior to this appointment, Richards held other positions at CDC. According to UNC where Richards earned his MPH, he has had a long career in public health, health care systems, clinical and academic medicine, and prevention leadership. He is well known for his insights into implementation of health care reform and public-private partnerships on quality improvement.
 

Appointed: Stephen Chanock, as the new director of the Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics at the National Cancer Institute.  Dr Chanock follows founding director Joseph Fraumeni and acting director Margaret Tucker. According to the NCI website, Dr Chanock has made contributions to the understanding of common inherited genetic variants associated with cancer risk and outcomes.
 

Honored: Caroline Buckee, assistant professor of epidemiology and associate director of the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at Harvard, as one of the year’s Innovators under 35 by MIT Technology Review. According to Harvard, Buckee’s work focuses on mining cell phone data to track how people’s movements correlate with the spread of disease.  
 

Honored: Michal Krzyzanowski, former head of the WHO European Center for Environment and Health in Bonn Germany, with the John Goldsmith award for his outstanding contribution to environmental epidemiology. The award was given at the meeting of the International Society for Environmental Epidemiology in Basel Switzerland last month. Krzyzanowski reviewed data on health risks from air pollution in Europe for 20 years while at WHO and said the award was as much an award for WHO as for him personally.
 

John Goldsmith was an early organizer, leader, and supporter of the International Society for Environmental Epidemiology. In describing the award, the WHO quoted Goldsmith on the importance of environmental epidemiology as follows: “We, the environmental epidemiologists of the world, are the canaries, capable of giving warning of impending environmental disaster in time for remedial steps to be taken. Fortunately, our fate is not to have to die as the unfortunate canaries of the coal miners did, but to sing, to call out in clear tones the nature and type of impending health danger that threatens.”

 

James Robins

Chesley Richards

Dr. Stephen Chanock

Caroline Buckee

Michael Krzyzanowski