Walter W. Holland

Walter W. Holland (born 1929) is an epidemiologist and public health physician.

Life

Walter Werner Holland was born on March 5, 1929 in Teplice-Sanov, Czechoslovakia. His parents were Henry Holland and Hertha Zentner. With the rise of Hitler the family fled to England in 1939.^[1]

He attended Rugby School and then went to St Thomas's Hospital Medical School where he qualified in medicine in 1954, having obtained a first degree in Physiology. He served in the Royal Air Force, attached to the Epidemiological Research Laboratory at Colindale and, after a further appointment as Lecturer to the Department of Medicine at St Thomas's, he was made MRC Clinical Research Fellow in the Department of Epidemiology and Medical Statistics at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. This was followed by a year in the Department of Epidemiology at John Hopkins School of Hygiene and then his return to St Thomas's in 1962 and his appointment to Professor in 1968.

It was at St. Thomas's that Holland developed his academic reputation. He established the Department of Clinical Epidemiology and Social Medicine and then the associated Health Services Research Unit with core funding from the Department of Health. He assembled a large staff including epidemiologists, social scientists and statisticians. They conducted a large number of studies on epidemiology of chronic respiratory disease, blood pressure, smoking, air pollution and the application of epidemiologic principles to health services research.

He is Emeritus Professor of Public Health Medicine and Visiting Professor at London School of Economics.^[2]

Work

Holland has had a very wide contribution to the development of epidemiology and public health. His groundbreaking paper on validation of medical screening procedures, published jointly with fellow epidemiologist Archie Cochrane in 1971, became a classic in the field.^[3]

Key publications

1990 Holland WW, Stewart S. Screening in Health Care. Benefit of Bane? Nuffield Provincial Hospitals Trust, London
1997 Detels R, Holland WW, McEwen J, Omenn GS. Oxford Textbook of Public Health, 3rd edition.
2007 Eds. WW Holland, Olsen J, Florey C du V. The Development of Modern Epidemiology. Oxford University Press, London

Awards

1980-82 President, Section of Epidemiology and Community Medicine, Royal Society of Medicine
1985 Chairman, Society for Social Medicine
1987–90 President, International Epidemiological Association
1989-1992 President, Faculty of Community Medicine/Public Health Medicine of the UK Royal College of Physicians in 1989.
1981 Awarded Doctor Honoris Causa, University of Bordeaux,
1985 Elected Honorary Member, American Epidemiological Society
1989 Awarded Salomon Neumann Medal by German Society of Social Medicine
1989 Awarded Medal of Distinction by the University of Pavia
1990 Awarded Doctor Honoris Causa, University of Berlin
1991 Elected "Hero of Public Health" by Johns Hopkins University School of Hygiene
1992 Awarded CBE
1993 Honorary Member Society For Social Medicine

References

↑ Oral history - Walter Holland, Journal of Public Health Medicine, 26(2), 121-129
↑ "Professor Walter Holland". Retrieved 3 December 2016.
↑ Cochrane, AL; Holland, WW (1971). "Validation of screening procedures". British Medical Bulletin. 27 (1): 3–8. PMID 5100948.

This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the 12/4/2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.