Oscar Franco - Biography#

Professor Oscar H. Franco is Professor and Director of Public Health at the Utrecht University.

Previous to that, he worked at the Institute of Social and Preventive Medicine (ISPM) at the University of Bern, Switzerland. He was a full professor of Epidemiology and Public Health at the University of Bern and Adjunct Professor at the University of Harvard.

Prof. Franco is also scientific advisor for the national TV channel France24, he has over 700 publications and a H-Index of 101.

Prof. Franco obtained his MD at Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Bogotá in 1998. He moved to the Netherlands to complete MSc and DSc degrees in clinical epidemiology and a PhD in public health and cardiovascular disease prevention (2005) at the Erasmus University Medical Center. Following a postdoc at Erasmus MC, he moved to the UK where he was a senior public health epidemiologist at Unilever England, assistant professor of public health at the University of Warwick, and then director of the MPhil program and clinical lecturer in public health at the University of Cambridge.

In 2012 Prof. Franco returned to Erasmus University Medical Center where he worked as professor of preventive medicine, principal investigator of the cardiovascular epidemiology group and Director and founder of ErasmusAGE.

A fellow of, inter alia, the European Society of Cardiology and St Edmunds’ College at the University of Cambridge, Prof. Franco was awarded the Dutch national public health prize of 2005.