45th Annual SER Meeting
Minneapolis, MN ** June 27 (eve) - 30, 2012
2012 Upcoming Deadlines:
- Early Registration Deadline: May 18, 2012
- Hotel Reservation Deadline: June 1, 2012
Preliminary Program now available! Click here to view program.
Keynote Speaker
Plenary Session 1, Thursday, June 28, 8:30 - 10:00 am
Willard Cates, Jr., M.D., M.P.H., FHI
Ward Cates is President, Research at FHI 360, a science-based global health and development organization that has been a leader in the worldwide fight against HIV/ AIDS. Before joining FHI seventeen years ago, Dr. Cates spent two decades at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where he directed STD/HIV prevention efforts and helped lead family planning evaluation activities.
Dr. Cates has authored or co-authored more than 450 scientific publications. He is past President of the Society for Epidemiologic Research and a Member of the Institute of Medicine, National Academy of Sciences and the American College of Preventive Medicine. He serves as Adjunct Professor of Epidemiology at the University of North Carolina Gillings School of Global Public Health and Clinical Professor in UNC's Departments of Medicine and Obstetrics/Gynecology.
John C Cassel Memorial Lecture Lecture
Plenary Session 2, Friday, June 29, 8:30 - 10:00 am
"WHERE HAVE YOU GONE, JOHN HENRY? Rising Social Inequalities and Health Disparities"
Sherman James, PhD, Duke University
Sherman A. James is the Susan B. King Professor of Public Policy at the Sanford School of Public Policy, Duke University. Prior to joining Duke University, he taught in the epidemiology departments at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill (1973-89) and at the University of Michigan (1989-03). At Michigan, he was the John P. Kirscht Collegiate Professor of Public Health, the Founding Director of the Center for Research on Ethnicity, Culture and Health (CRECH), and a Senior Research Scientist in the Survey Research Center at the Institute for Social Research.
James' research focuses on the social determinants of racial and ethnic health inequalities and community-based and public policy interventions designed to minimize, and ultimately eliminate, these inequalities.
James was elected to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences in 2000. In 2001, he received the Abraham Lilienfeld Award from the Epidemiology section of the American Public Health Association for career excellence in the teaching of epidemiology. He is a fellow of the American Epidemiological Society, the American College of Epidemiology, the American Heart Association, and the Academy of Behavioral Medicine Research. In 2007-08, he was elected president of the Society for Epidemiologic Research (SER), the largest organization of its kind in the world. A social epidemiologist, James received his PhD (Social Psychology) from Washington University in St. Louis (1973.)
"History of Epidemiology"
Plenary Session 1, Thursday, June 28, 8:30 - 10:00 am
"The World Was Our Laboratory;" Origins and Early Evolution of Cardiovascular Disease Epidemiology
Henry Blackburn, University of Minneapolis
Dr. Blackburn is Mayo Professor of Public Health emeritus at the University of Minnesota's School of Public Health in Minneapolis and emeritus professor of medicine at the same university's School of Medicine.
He received a B.S. in chemistry from the University of Miami in 1947 and an M.D. from Tulane in 1948. After that, he interned at Northwestern’s Wesley Memorial Hospital in Chicago and was resident physician at the American Hospital in Paris, where he worked with cardiovascular surgeon Rene Leriche. He was medical officer in charge for the U.S. Public Health Service in its Displaced Persons operations in Salzburg and Munich from 1950 to 1953, then became a fellow in Internal Medicine at the University of Minnesota until 1956. During this time he was chief resident in medicine at St. Paul - Ramsey County Hospital (then Ancker Hospital), after which he was in private practice of internal medicine and was Medical Director of Mutual Service Insurance Companies part-time while a Research Fellow in the Laboratory of Physiological Hygiene in the University of Minnesota’s School of Public Health. He became full-time faculty in 1960 and took Ancel Keys’s chair of that laboratory at the time of Keys’s retirement in 1972 following which he chaired the Division of Epidemiology from 1983 to 1990. He retired in 1996 and remains as active emeritus professor part-time on the faculty of Epidemiology and Community Health.
Dr. Blackburn's research fields are cardiovascular and chronic disease epidemiology, clinical trials, electrocardiography in population studies, exercise electrocardiography and physiology, evolutionary medicine, and the history of cardiovascular disease epidemiology. His early signature contributions with colleagues in that field were the Minnesota Code for Electrocardiograms in Population Studies in 1960 and, with Geoffrey Rose, the WHO Manual: “Cardiovascular Survey Methods” in 1968. He served as project officer of the Seven Countries Study and was principal investigator for the Sudden Death Study, the Minnesota Heart Survey, and the Minnesota Heart Health Program, and served on the Steering Committee of the Coronary Drug Project and the Multiple Risk Factor Intervention Trial. He has served on the Advisory Council of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute; chaired the Medical Section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science; been a member of the National Research Council's Committee on Diet and Health; chaired the Councils on Epidemiology and Prevention (under the International Society of Cardiology and the American Heart Association); been a member of the Food Advisory Committee of the Food and Drug Administration; and served on the editorial boards of journals in cardiovascular and chronic diseases. He has also been a consultant to the World Health Organization and U.S./Russian and U.S./Japanese health treaties.
In semi-retirement, Dr. Blackburn directs a National Library of Medicine grant on the History of Cardiovascular Disease Epidemiology and supervises the development of an archive and website on this history, available at: http://www.epi.umn.edu/cvdepi/index.html