Biographical Information

Born in Athens in 1938. He studied Medicine at the University of Athens and specialized in Internal Medicine, Microbiology, Public Health and Epidemiology at the Universities of Athens, London, Harvard, and Oxford. He is Professor and Director of the Department of Hygiene and Epidemiology, Harvard School of Public Health, since 1989, and Professor of Cancer Prevention and Director of the Center for Cancer Prevention, Harvard University, since 1992.

In Greece he has served as Chairman of the Interuniversity Center, the State Council of Occupational Diseases, the State Population Committee and other Committees; as Rapporteur the State Health Planning Committee; and as member in more than 40 State committees.

At the international level he has served as: Consultant or Temporary Advisor to the World Health Organization on several topics, including Cancer Aetiology and Prevention, Health Services Research, Health Statistics, and Epidemiology of various diseases and conditions; Faculty Member in several Graduate or Postgraduate Courses of the International Agency for Research of Cancer, of the European School of Oncology, and several universities;

Member of the Panel of Social; Medicine and Epidemiology of the European Community (EC) and of the EC Working Group of Epidemiology and Biostatistics; Organizer of several EC projects including those dealing with Cancer Control, Passive Smoking, and Teaching and Epidemiology. In the USA he serves as Chairman of the Tobacco Related Diseases Epidemiology Program (University of California), as Member of the Department of Energy and Oak Rid ge Associated Universities Panel on the health effects of electromagnetic fields, as Member of the Environmental Epidemiology Group of the American Health Foundation, and several other Committees.

Recipient of the Eleanor Roosevelt Fellowship; Cutter Lecturer at the Harvard School of Public Health (1982) and Ipsen Lecturer at the Institute of Social Medicine of Aarhus University (1987); Member of the Delta Omega Honorary Public Health Society, U.S.A.; Officier del Ordre des Palmes Academiques, France; Member of 18 American, European or International Scientific Societies; Foreign Member of the National Academy of Medicine of France and of the Royal Academy of Medicine of Belgium; Chairman of the EC Health Group and the EC AIDS Group during the Greek Presidency (1988) of the European Community; Distinguished Lecturer in the Japan Cancer Resear ch Center (1992); Honorary Doctor of Medicine, University of Uppsala (1994).

Dimitrios Trichopoulos has authored or co-authored over 650 publications (mainly research papers but also books, monographs, reports, reviews, commentaries, etc). His research work has contributed to the discovery of the role of passive smoking in the causation of lung cancer and chronic obstructive lung disease, the elucidation of the aetiology of hepatocellular carcimona, the quantification of the association between psychological str ess and coronary heart disease and the identification of several dietary and other important risk factors in the aetiology of the number of cancers and other diseases. He is currently working on a major hypothesis that he has developed concerning the aetiology of breast cancer.