Frank E. Speizer

In a 2011 interview with Douglas Dockery, Speizer listed his research interests as "the natural history of chronic respiratory disease and... the components that cause the disease to get worse" and "the natural history of what happens as people get older, and the interaction with lifestyle and behavioural factors".

Speizer was elected a Member of the National Academy of Medicine in 2000. His awards include the John Goldsmith Award for Outstanding Contributions to Environmental Epidemiology (awarded by the International Society for Environmental Epidemiology), the William Silen Lifetime Achievement in Mentoring Award (awarded by Harvard University), the World Lung Health Award (awarded by the American Thoracic Society), the Charles S. Mott Prize for cancer research, and the Excellence in Women's Health Award (awarded by the Jacobs Institute of Women's Health).

In 1976, inspired by his work in England, Speizer decided to conduct a large study of women's illnesses, notably cancer and heart disease, using a cohort of 120,000 nurses whose health would be monitored over the following years and decades. This became the first Nurses' Health Study, which spawned "hundreds of scientific papers... covering scores of diseases".

Speizer was born in San Francisco and studied for a bachelor's degree (1957) and MD (1960) at Stanford University and Stanford Medical School, completing his medical training at Boston City Hospital and Stanford-Palo Alto Hospital. After discovering a keen interest in mathematics, he began working in epidemiology, specializing in air pollution, initially as a summer student at the California State Health Department. His interest developed further when he took a research fellowship in respiratory physiology at Harvard School of Public Health, working with James Whittenberger, who was chair of physiology, and Benjamin Ferris. Later, he spent two years at the MRC Statistical Research Unit in London, researching asthma in young people with Sir Richard Doll. It was here that he first conceived the idea of doing a cohort study of women's health, initially looking into the effects of oral contraceptives on a population of doctors' wives.

Frank Erwin Speizer (born 8 June 1935) is an American physician and epidemiologist, currently Professor of Environmental Health and Environmental Science at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and Edward H. Kass Distinguished Professor of Medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School. He is best known for his work on two major epidemiological cohort studies: the Nurses' Health Study, which explored women's illnesses and health risk factors, and the Harvard Six Cities study, which definitively linked air pollution to higher death rates in urban areas.