Harvard Catalyst Profiles

University of Queensland, Australia	MBBS	1979
Harvard University		1986
University of Queensland, Australia	M.D.	1998

Dr. Colditz is an Epidemiologist and from 1999 to 2006 was Principal Investigator of the ongoing Nurses’ Health Study located at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital. This cohort, founded by Frank Speizer, M.D., follows 121,700 U.S. women with questionnaire assessment of lifestyle factors and the use of biomarkers to assess risk of chronic diseases among women (http://www.nurseshealthstudy.org/). He also led studies based on tissue samples from participants with prior biopsies for benign breast disease to evaluate changes that predict future risk of breast cancer.

He served as Principal Investigator of an ongoing cohort study of 16,000 adolescents relating lifestyle to weight gain in youth from its inception in 1996 to 2006. The focus of this study has been diet, physical activity, smoking, and weight gain among adolescents. His public health practice activities have included collaborations through the WIC program to improve diet assessment and nutrition education in the service delivery setting, and work with the Massachusetts Department of Public Health and the American Cancer Society to prevent cancer.

Within the Harvard Center for Cancer Prevention, Dr. Colditz served as the Director to 2006, and took a leadership role in the development of the Center’s website, http://www.yourdiseaserisk.harvard.edu/, which provides information to the public on the contribution of lifestyle factors to cancer incidence and the potential for prevention of cancer and other chronic diseases including heart disease, stroke, diabetes, and osteoporosis.

In 2003, Dr. Colditz was the recipient of the ACS Clinical Research Professorship award. He was also awarded the DeWitt S. Goodman Lectureship by AACR on 2003. Since 2004, he has been funded by the Breast Cancer Research Foundation to further evaluate risk factors for breast cancer and the potential for prevention. He is a Fellow of the Australian Faculty of Public Health Medicine, the Royal Australian College of Physicians and was elceted to membership in teh Insitute of Medicine in 2006.

He currently serves as the Associate Director for Prevention and Control at the Alvin J. Siteman Cancer Center at Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis”