Maria Glymour recently accepted the role as the new chair of the Department of Epidemiology at Boston University School of Public Health. She will join the SPH community on June 1.

Glymour is currently a professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco. Prior to joining UCSF, she was an Assistant Professor at the Harvard School of Public Health and a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health and Society Scholar in Social Epidemiology at Columbia University. She holds a position as Adjunct Professor of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health. Glymour holds degrees from the University of Chicago and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Glymour’s research interests include social policies and health, social and geographic determinants of population health and health equity, causal inference methods for social epidemiology, and cognitive aging, stroke, Alzheimer’s disease, and related causes of dementia. She previously served as the Director for the UCSF PhD program in Epidemiology and Translational Science. She co-leads the UCSF T32 training grant on Aging and Chronic Disease and the UCSF T32 on Data Science Training to Advance Behavioral and Social Science Expertise for Health Disparities Research.

In 2012, Glymour and colleagues launched the international Methods in Longitudinal Dementia Research (MELODEM) initiative to address the need for greater coherence and consensus on methods for longitudinal research in epidemiologic studies of dementia. MELODEM is currently housed at SPH via an NIH conference grant led by Jennifer Weuve, associate professor of epidemiology. Glymour continues to serve as a member of the organizing committee.

Glymour serves on the Editorial Board of the American Journal of Epidemiology, and she has twice been recognized as a Reviewer of the Year Awardee. She also serves as Associate Editor of the Journal of Causal Inference and is an Editorial Board member of the journal Neurology.

“We are thrilled that Maria Glymour is joining our community, and we look forward to welcoming her this coming summer,” says Dean Sandro Galea. “Dr. Glymour brings with her tremendous experience and proven leadership, and I am excited to work with her in the years to come as our Epidemiology department grows and thrives.”