David Hunter
MBBS, MPH, ScD, FRACPHM
Richard Doll Professor of Epidemiology and Medicine; Director, Translational Epidemiology Unit
David Hunter studied medicine at the University of Sydney, before moving to Harvard University for 33 years where he was the Vincent L. Gregory Professor of Cancer Prevention. He is the Richard Doll Professor of Epidemiology and Medicine, and director of the Harvard-Oxford Program in Epidemiology. His early research was on HIV transmission in East Africa, and subsequently he was involved in collaborative studies of nutrition and HIV pathogenesis, while also studying diet and cancer etiology in large scale prospective studies and founding the Pooling Project of Prospective Studies of Diet and Cancer.
As Director of the Harvard Center for Cancer Prevention he developed a sample handling and genotyping laboratory to explore genetic associations with cancer, and gene-environment interactions. He founded the Program in Genetic Epidemiology and Statistical Genetics at Harvard. He was co-chair of the steering committee of the NCI Breast and Prostate Cancer Cohort Consortium (BPC3) between 2003 and 2012, was co-director of the NCI Cancer Genetic Susceptibility Markers project focused on genome-wide association studies, and was an Eminent Scholar at the NCI between 2004 and 2009.
From 2009-2016 he was Dean for Academic Affairs at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, and in 2015-2016 he was Acting Dean. He is one of about 3000 “highly cited researchers” worldwide according to Thomson-Reuters.
Recent publications
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Are polygenic risk scores for systolic blood pressure and LDL-cholesterol associated with treatment effectiveness, and clinical outcomes among those on treatment?
Journal article
Tapela NM. et al, (2021), Eur J Prev Cardiol
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Germline variants and breast cancer survival in patients with distant metastases at primary breast cancer diagnosis.
Journal article
Escala-Garcia M. et al, (2021), Sci Rep, 11
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Mendelian randomisation study of smoking exposure in relation to breast cancer risk.
Journal article
Park HA. et al, (2021), Br J Cancer, 125, 1135 - 1145
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Association of germline genetic variants with breast cancer-specific survival in patient subgroups defined by clinic-pathological variables related to tumor biology and type of systemic treatment.
Journal article
Morra A. et al, (2021), Breast Cancer Res, 23
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The Complementarity of Public Health and Medicine - Achieving "the Highest Attainable Standard of Health".
Journal article
Hunter DJ., (2021), N Engl J Med, 385, 481 - 484