Abraham Lilienfeld Award address: 2017 Annual Meeting of the American College of Epidemiology

Abstract

The address was delivered by Roberta B. Ness, MD MPH at the Annual Meeting of the American College of Epidemiology in New Orleans, Louisiana on September 26, 2017. Dr. Ness is James W. Rockwell Professor of Public Health and Vice-President for Innovation at the University of Texas School of Public Health. Recognized nationally and internationally for her expertise in women's health research, Dr. Ness pioneered the area of "gender-based biology". In more recent years, she developed an innovative program at the UT School of Public Health aimed at cultivating "outside the box" thinking among training scientists. Dr. Ness has authored a range of books on her work, including Health and Disease among Women (1999), Innovation Generation (2012), Genius Unmasked (2013) and The Creativity Crisis: Reinventing Science to Unleash Possibility (2014). Dr. Ness is Past-President of both the American College of Epidemiology and American Epidemiological Society, an honorary society of epidemiologists. She is also former Dean of UTHealth School of Public Health and former Interim Dean at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health. Dr. Ness is a frequent advisor to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), and US Department of Defense (DOD). She has an MD from Cornell University and MPH from Columbia University. Dr. Ness is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine, American Society of Clinical Investigation (ASCI), and Delta Omega honorary society.