Faculty Elected to Leading Roles at Society for Epidemiologic Research.

Two faculty members have been elected to key positions with the Society for Epidemiologic Research (SER), the largest organization of epidemiologists in the world.

Lauren Wise, an associate professor of epidemiology and current at-large member of the SER Executive Committee, was elected to a three-year term as secretary-treasurer. Bernard Harlow, a noted researcher and newly hired faculty member from the University of Minnesota, was named the group’s president-elect.

Wise, who is also a senior epidemiologist at BU’s Slone Epidemiology Center, joined the Department of Epidemiology in 2004 after completing her ScD degree at the Harvard School of Public Health. She has an interest in reproductive epidemiology, and her research has involved the study of benign gynecologic conditions and delayed time-to-pregnancy in women.

Wise is also principal investigator of Boston University Pregnancy Study Online (PRESTO), an Internet-based prospective study of time-to-pregnancy that is one of the first web-based studies in North America to examine whether lifestyle factors such as diet, exercise, and medication use have an impact on fertility and pregnancy outcomes. She is also a co-investigator of the Black Women’s Health Study, a nationwide prospective cohort study of more than 59,000 African American women. She is principal investigator of NICHD-funded studies examining the influence of diet, genetics, and psychosocial factors on risk of uterine fibroids in African American women.

Harlow, who joined SPH on July 1 and will begin teaching in the Fall 2015 semester, received his MPH in epidemiology from the University of Minnesota and his PhD in epidemiology from the University of Washington. He was a Mayo Professor of Epidemiology at the University Of Minnesota School Of Public Health, where he chaired the Division of Epidemiology and Community Health for nearly 10 years.

Before leaving Minnesota, Harlow directed the Populations and Community Engagement Core of the University of Minnesota Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute and was the research director for the NIH-funded Building Interdisciplinary Research Careers in Women’s Health (BIRCWH).

Upon completion of his doctoral training at the University of Washington, Harlow spent 18 years at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital as a clinical epidemiologist and faculty member at the Harvard School of Medicine and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. During that period, he co-founded the Obstetrics and Gynecology Epidemiology Center.