Four faculty members in public health honored with endowed chairs

Four faculty members with appointments at the School of Public Health were recently named to endowed chairs.

Dean Michael H. Merson, M.D., was named the Anna M.R. Lauder Professor of Public Health; Michael B. Bracken, M.P.H. ’70, Ph.D. ’74, and Brian P. Leaderer, M.P.H. ’71, Ph.D. ’75, were each appointed Susan Dwight Bliss Professor of Public Health; and Hongyu Zhao, Ph.D., was named the Ira V. Hiscock Associate Professor of Public Health and Genetics.

Merson is a noted authority on AIDS and director of Yale’s Center for Interdisciplinary Research on AIDS, which was established in 1997 to support HIV prevention research in vulnerable and underserved populations in the United States and abroad. He focuses his own work on international aspects of HIV prevention and related policies. Prior to his involvement in AIDS research, Merson undertook studies of the epidemiology of diarrheal diseases, including cholera, in developing countries.

Following his medical training Merson spent three years working for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and then became the chief medical epidemiologist at the Cholera Research Laboratory in Bangladesh. From 1978 until 1995 he worked for the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva, and from 1990 to 1995 he headed the worldwide effort to control the AIDS pandemic as the director, then executive director, of the WHO’s Global Programme on AIDS.

At Yale Merson also directs the AIDS International Training and Research Program, based in St. Petersburg, Russia, and the AIDS International Clinical, Operational, and Health Services Research Program based in Pretoria, South Africa. Both programs are supported by the National Institutes of Health’s Fogarty International Center. He has been a consultant to the World Bank and to its AIDS prevention projects in such countries as India, Russia, Bangladesh, Nigeria and Madagascar. He has chaired several national panels and committees focused on the prevention of HIV and other diseases.

Bracken is head of the Chronic Disease Epidemiology Division in the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health. He specializes in the epidemiology of diseases of pregnant women and newborns and has been instrumental in developing therapies for acute spinal cord injuries. He combines these interests in his research and as director of the Yale Perinatal Epidemiology Unit and the National Acute Spinal Cord Injury Study. The former, which he has led since 1979, conducts research on obstetric, perinatal and neonatal disease. The latter, which Bracken has overseen since 1977, conducts randomized trials of therapies for preventing paralysis after spinal cord injury.

Bracken and his colleagues identified the first successful therapy for acute spinal trauma in 1990. His articles in this area have examined the effectiveness and timing of the drugs methylprednisolone and naloxone in treating spinal trauma and the effectiveness of surgery in combination with drug therapies in treating spinal cord injuries.

Leaderer is a noted authority on air quality whose research focuses on assessing exposures to air contaminants and the health impact of such exposures. His work includes developing a theoretical framework for assessing exposure in epidemiological studies, determining the type and quality of health-related contaminants emitted from sources, assessing environmental concentrations of contaminants and developing monitoring and modeling techniques.

Leaderer is head of the Division of Environmental Health Sciences in the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health and is the principal investigator of studies examining the role of indoor and outdoor air contaminant exposures in respiratory symptoms in infants and their nonsmoking mothers, risk factors for the development of asthma in infants and young children, and the relationship of indoor allergens and air contaminants to the severity of asthma in young children.

Zhao studies the development of mathematical, statistical and computational methods to address scientific questions raised in molecular biology and genetics. He is working with colleagues on the development of tools for identifying genes underlying complex diseases, studying genetic variations in populations around the world and investigating genetic mechanisms related to mental retardation. He is also developing statistical methods to estimate gene expression levels from microarray data, to identify genes with correlated expression patterns and to understand a variety of biological pathways.

Zhao is the principal investigator of three research studies currently under way in the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health and is involved in several other studies. His work has been funded by the National Institutes of Health and the March of Dimes Foundation.