David Hunter (epidemiologist)

David John Hunter
Born	London, U.K.
Nationality	United Kingdom, Australian
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 was Acting Dean of the Faculty and before that Dean for Academic Affairs at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston, and Vincent L. Gregory Professor in Cancer Prevention, Emeritus. He also is an epidemiologist teaching and researching in the School's Departments of Epidemiology and Nutrition, and he was associate epidemiologist, Channing Laboratory, Brigham And Women's Hospital, where he was involved with the programs in breast cancer, cancer epidemiology, and cancer genetics research teams. Also, Hunter is a statistical consultant for the NEJM. He retired from Harvard and currently holds a public health position at University of Oxford, where he leads a collaborative project between Oxford and the Harvard Chan School.

Early life and education

David Hunter was born in London, England and while an infant moved with his family to Sydney, Australia, where he later earned his medical degree (MBBS) in 1982. He then moved to the United States for graduate study at the Harvard School of Public Health, where he earned both a master's degree (MPH, 1985) and a doctorate (ScD, 1988) in public health.

Career

David Hunter is an epidemiologist who served at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston as Vincent L. Gregory Professor in Cancer Prevention, and Acting Dean of the Faculty and former Dean for Academic Affairs, and teaching and researching in the School's Departments of Epidemiology and Nutrition.

Academic affairs

When he was Dean for Academic Affairs, he oversaw major academic operations of the School, including Academic Affairs—including Faculty Affairs, Student Affairs, and Diversity and Inclusion, as managed by Senior Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, Michael Grusby; and Research Strategy and Development, as administered by Senior Associate Dean for Research, Francesca Dominici.

Teaching and research

Hunter's principal career research interests are the etiology of various cancers, particularly breast, colorectal, and skin cancers, and prostate cancer in men. He has been 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 Nurses Health 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.

Because he completed his graduate work at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, his teaching contributions have been concentrated there, where he direct the Genetic Epidemiology and Statistical Genetics concentration in the Department of Epidemiology. From 1999 to 2005, he Director of the Quantitative Methods Concentration of the Master of Public Health degree. Most recently, he had been Lead Instructor for Managing Epidemiologic Data, Studies in Molecular Epidemiology, and Molecular Epidemiology of Cancer. Hunter also is a statistical consultant for the NEJM.

Genetic susceptibility to cancer and other chronic diseases

The completion of the Human Genome Project and databases of population genetic variation presents the major challenge of determining how such genetic variants contribute to both human and nonhuman health conditions. Epidemiologists are responsible for both assessing the proportion of specific diseases associated with particular genotypes and how these genotypes interact with environmental and lifestyle factors in contributing causally to disease conditions. Large, population-based cohort studies can be particularly helpful in studying these issues, and Hunter and colleagues are working with colleagues in the Nurses’ Health Studies, Health Professionals Follow-up Study, and the Physicians’ Health Study, to conduct nested case-control studies of cancers, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and other phenotypes. With collaborators at the National Cancer Institute, they conducted genome-wide association studies (GWAS) of breast cancer and other cancers. These studies are discovering novel genetic variants associated with risk of these cancers, and multiple other phenotypes that have been collected in these studies. For instance, in 2007 they co-discovered the most common genetic variant associated with risk of breast cancer, and in subsequent years other variants associated with breast, prostate, and skin cancer, as well as other phenotypes such as age at menarche, hair color, and other biomarkers.

Cancer Consortia

Until 2012, Hunter was Co-Chair of the NCI Breast and Prostate Cancer Cohort Consortium and Co-Director of the NCI Cancer Genetic Markers of Susceptibility (CGEMS) Special Initiative. They became members of large collaborative consortia in order to obtain the necessarily large sample sizes and to assess consistency of results across studies.

HIV research and global health

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 currently co-edits a series of articles on global health which are being published in the New England Journal of Medicine, for which he also serves as a statistical consultant.

Publications

• January 26, 2015, Most cancers not just "bad luck"
• NCBI publications for Dr. David Hunter
• Selected Publications (Since 2012) for David Hunter