Frank E. Speizer

Frank Erwin Speizer (born 8 June 1935) is an American physician and epidemiologist, currently Professor of Environmental Health and Environmental Science at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and Edward H. Kass Distinguished Professor of Medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School. He is best known for his work on two major epidemiological cohort studies: the Nurses' Health Study, which explored women's illnesses and health risk factors, and the Harvard Six Cities study, which definitively linked air pollution to higher death rates in urban areas. Speizer was born in San Francisco and studied for a bachelor's degree (1957) and MD (1960) at Stanford University and Stanford Medical School, completing his medical training at Boston City Hospital and Stanford-Palo Alto Hospital. After discovering a keen interest in mathematics, he began working in epidemiology, specializing in air pollution, initially as a summer student at the California State Health Department. His interest developed further when he took a research fellowship in respiratory physiology at Harvard School of Public Health, working with James Whittenberger, who was chair of physiology, and Benjamin Ferris. Later, he spent two years at the MRC Statistical Research Unit in London, researching asthma in young people with Sir Richard Doll. It was here that he first conceived the idea of doing a cohort study of women's health, initially looking into the effects of oral contraceptives on a population of doctors' wives. After Speizer returned to Harvard, he worked with Whittenberger and Ferris on what would eventually become the Six Cities study: a cohort study of people living in urban areas that demonstrated an association between fine-particulate air pollution and higher death rates. In 1976, inspired by his work in England, Speizer decided to conduct a large study of women's illnesses, notably cancer and heart disease, using a cohort of 120,000 nurses whose health would be monitored over the following years and decades.