Eva Schernhammer - Biography#

Dr. Schernhammer is an alumna of the University of Vienna (MD 1992), who conducted several years of clinical work at the SMZ-Süd (formerly Kaiser-Franz-Josef Hospital) in Vienna, with a focus on oncology, before she became full-time faculty at Harvard Medical School/Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in 2003. Since 2015, she is Professor of Epidemiology and Head of the Department of Epidemiology at the Medical University of Vienna, while maintaining active research programs at Harvard. In addition to her MD (Medical University of Vienna, 1992) and Doctor of Public Health, Epidemiology (DrPH, 2003 Harvard School of Public Health), she also holds an MPH (Harvard School of Public Health, 2000) and MPhil (Psychology, University of Vienna, 2003). In 2005, Dr. Eva Schernhammer received her Habilitation in Public Health from the Medical University of Vienna.

Dr. Schernhammer’s research, relating the influence of lifestyle, including diet, and environmental risk factors to chronic diseases and longevity in humans, has been primarily based in the Harvard cohorts, including the Nurses’ Health Studies (NHS) and the Health Professionals Follow-up Study, and a California based cohort study, the Osteoporotic Fractures in Men (MrOS) cohort of older men (which, together, comprise >350,000 individuals). Dr. Schernhammer has been with the NHS group at Harvard Medical School since 2000 where she gathered vast experience in the complexities of initiating and maintaining large questionnaire- and online based longitudinal cohort studies including the establishment of biorepositories. She has collaborated with colleagues from UCLA and Denmark to establish the world’s largest population-based case control study on Parkinson’s disease. Her research explores the effects of lifestyle and environmental risk factors on mortality and various aging related outcomes including cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and cognitive function. Another research focus has been to study pathways of indicators of energy balance including IGFs with respect to cancer risk, and the etiology and prevention of gastrointestinal tumors, including the chemopreventive effects of COX-2 inhibitors and methyl donors on cancer risk. According to Web of Science,™ she is author of 341 scientific papers and reports in the above-mentioned fields yielding an h-index of 68.