Biography
Dr. Rothman has 55 years of professional experience in Epidemiologic research. As a graduate student, he became interested in defining and measuring interaction between different causes of a common effect, sparked by a paper examining the effect of alcohol consumption and tobacco smoking on the development of oral cancer. This interest evolved into an approach to measure the interaction between the two causes, applying a simple model describing the general structure of causal mechanisms. His substantive research has included work on the epidemiology of cancer, cardiovascular disease, birth defects, environmental epidemiology, pharmaceutical products, and methodological, conceptual and ethical issues in epidemiology. Specific projects have included research on the teratogenicity of vitamin A, the health effects of cellular telephone use, and factors affecting fecundability. Dr. Rothman is the author of two widely used textbooks of epidemiologic methods, Modern Epidemiology and Epidemiology: an Introduction, and is the founding editor of Epidemiology, a leading public-health journal. He has taught invited courses in the concepts and methods of epidemiology on over 100 occasions in two dozen countries. In 1978, he wrote a sounding board article in the New England Journal of Medicine suggesting that reliance on statistical significance testing to interpret study results was misleading; instead he encouraged a focus on the estimation of effect magnitude, a quantitative rather than qualitative assessment. Through articles, textbooks and teaching, he has consistently advocated for replacing the dichotomous approach of significance testing with estimation of effects. He received the American Public Health Association’s Abraham Lilienfeld Award for 2002, recognizing excellence in the teaching of epidemiology during the course of a career. He is a Fellow of the International Society for Pharmacoepidemiology, past president of the Society for Epidemiologic Research, and an honorary fellow of the American College of Epidemiology. In 2002 the journal Epidemiology renamed its annual prize the "Kenneth Rothman Epidemiology Prize.” In 2017 the Society for Epidemiologic Research awarded him its first Career Accomplishment Award. Subsequently, the annual award was renamed the “Kenneth J. Rothman Career Accomplishment Award.” He is the recipient of two honorary MD degrees, one from the University of Aarhus in 2017 and the other from the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia in 2024. Rothman has been a Professor of Epidemiology at Boston University since 1989. In addition to being Professor at Boston University, he is Distinguished Fellow Emeritus at the Research Triangle Institute and an Honorary Professor at the Faculty of Health of Aarhus University.