ASPH Honors SPH Faculty Member with Distinguished Research Award
Lauren A. Wise, an associate professor of epidemiology, received the 2011 ASPH/Pfizer Young Investigator’s Award for Distinguished Research in Public Health at the annual meeting of the ASPH in Washington, DC, Oct. 29-Nov. 2. This was held in conjunction with the American Public Health Association Annual Meeting & Exposition, the world’s oldest and largest gathering of public health professionals.
The award honors a single, outstanding research paper published in 2010 by a full-time, young investigator, faculty member from a full ASPH-member, CEPH-accredited school of public health. The research must have promising implications for improving a population’s health.
“Dr. Wise is a young investigator who has, in a very short time, established herself as a world expert on the epidemiology of uterine leiomyomata (UL), commonly known as uterine fibroids,” said Roberta White, professor and chair of environmental health, who nominated Wise’s paper, “A prospective study of dairy intake and risk of uterine leiomyomata.”
The paper, based on more than 22,000 premenopausal participants from the Black Women’s Health Study, documented an inverse association between dairy consumption and risk of uterine fibroids. “Because dairy consumption is a modifiable risk factor, the results from this study have high potential to influence primary prevention of the disease and public health practice,” White wrote.
Dr. Wise joined the Department of Epidemiology in the BU School of Public Health in 2004 after completing her ScD at the Harvard School of Public Health. Her previous research in reproroductive epidemiology has involved the study of early pregnancy loss, benign gynecologic tumors, and menopause in women.
Wise is co-investigator of the Black Women’s Health Study, a nationwide prospective cohort study of more than 59,000 African-American women, and the Snart Gravid Study, an internet-based prospective cohort study of fertility in Denmark. She is a past receipent of a Hood Foundation Child Health grant to investigate the role of prepregnancy obesity and gestational weight gain on preterm birth and macrosomia. She teaches “EP857: Design and Conduct of Cohort Studies,” and also serves on both the Department of Epidemiology Doctoral Committee and the Boston University Reproductive, Perinatal, and Pediatric Epidemiology Training Grant.