“I Want to Mentor the Next Generation of Scientists”.

When the Society for Epidemiologic Research (SER) convenes in June for its annual meeting, Professor Bernard Harlow will officially become the 50th president of the most prominent organization in the field of epidemiology.

Harlow was voted the group’s president-elect in mid-2015, just before he joined the School of Public Health from the University Of Minnesota School of Public Health, where he was a Mayo Professor of Epidemiology and chaired the Division of Epidemiology and Community Health for nearly 10 years.

While at 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). Harlow spent 18 years at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital as a clinical epidemiologist and as an adjunct faculty member at the Harvard School of Medicine and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

In an interview last fall, Harlow explained that one of the major reasons he came to SPH was to further his commitment to training the next generation of research epidemiologists. Training and mentorship have been an important part of his career at every stage, an undertaking demonstrated by a robust record of publishing collaborations with early-career researchers. Over the past 25 years, about a third of his articles have been in the mentorship role of doctoral and postdoctoral students, clinical fellows, and junior faculty members.

Harlow’s own doctoral training at the University of Washington led to working with Daniel Cramer at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital on the etiology of ovarian cancer. Harlow aided Cramer in launching the Obstetrics and Gynecology Epidemiology Center at the Brigham, but Harlow described how he veered off into his own research into benign gynecologic disorders, a path that branched out into studies of malignant and borderline ovarian tumors, adverse obstetrical outcomes, premature menopause, and other gynecological complications, particularly those arising in women suffering from childhood victimization and a variety of psychiatric disorders.

Q: While at the Brigham, what generated that interest in the connection between psychiatric factors and gynecological health?

A: Particularly, I was quite interested in looking at factors that influenced the menopausal transition, particularly psychiatric morbidity and how it relates. And then I became quite interested in unexplained vulvar pain, an area that was largely unrecognized in women in the general population.  I was fortunate to have one of the first NIH studies to actually go into the general population to document the prevalence of that problem and then also conduct etiological studies around that.

Q: Can you elaborate a bit on your work on victimization as a possible cause of poor reproductive health outcomes in women?

A: I have always had an interest in trying to understand the bridge between psychiatric morbidity and its influence on reproductive and gynecologic outcomes across the lifespan. And when you look at mood disorder or other psychiatric morbidity, that’s highly correlated with having been victimized. And so it is another aspect of emotional aspects that I am particularly interested in and particularly how emotional aspects, psychosocial factors as well as psychiatric morbidity actually impact on biological processes, endocrine function, and immune function. Taking a bio-psychosocial approach to understanding the cause of adverse health outcomes has been my mantra.

Q: How has that approach influenced or affected your recent and current research?

A: I am continuing to do research in vulvar pain and finished a large NIH-funded study to look at both psychological as well as environmental factors related to the risk of vulvar pain. I was just awarded a grant as a multiple PI with a colleague of mine at the University of Minnesota to lead the scientific and data coordinating center of a consortium of multiple institutions to launch studies around understanding the etiology of lower urinary tract symptoms in women. It is called the PLUS Consortium, with seven clinical centers.

We are moving toward trying to do studies to understand what constitutes a healthy bladder in women, so that we can actually move much more upstream to prevent the onset of lower urinary tract symptoms such as overactive bladder syndrome, interstitial cystitis, and urinary incontinence. That whole spectrum that actually affects women not just as they move toward the later years, but actually affects a large number of women even in their younger, reproductive years as well.

Q: You’ve had a balance of scholarship, teaching, and mentoring throughout your career. How are you hoping to continue that at SPH?

A: I had been the chair of epidemiology for 10 years at the University of Minnesota. And when I stepped down I started to think about, “What do I really want to do for the latter part of my career?” And many people, when they step down from that type of academic administrative position, either move on to be a dean and continue up that administrative ladder, or they go back and do their own research, perhaps in a siloed fashion, and do not necessarily spend time giving everything that they have learned onto the next generation of scientists.

And in this very difficult funding environment, there is a lot of frustration that I have seen on the part of junior faculty, and so I decided that what I really wanted to do was to spend a large proportion of my time mentoring the next generation of scientists. There is not a very good academic model for that or financial model for that. And I could not see how I could make that work in Minnesota.

At Boston University, we are fortunate to have a dean who has the vision to see how important that contribution can be to making faculty successful here. And so I have been spending time working with a number of faculty here to try to provide guidance on their K Award applications, their other NIH type of applications, ways—particularly interdisciplinary teams—and I am working with a number of faculty in the School of Public Health to mobilize all of our research support infrastructure to be able to make it more accessible not only to our faculty here in the School of Public Health, but to faculty across the entire academic clinical enterprise.