Douglas William Dockery is an American epidemiologist and the John L. Loeb and Frances Lehman Loeb Professor of Environmental Epidemiology at the

Harvard School of Public Health The Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health is the public health school of Harvard University, located in the Longwood Medical Area of Boston, Massachusetts. The school grew out of the Harvard- MIT School for Health Officers, the nation's firs ...

(HSPH).

Education

Dockery received his B.S. in physics from the

University of Maryland The University of Maryland, College Park (University of Maryland, UMD, or simply Maryland) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in College Park, Maryland. Founded in 1856, UMD is the Flagship un ...

and his M.S. in meteorology from the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a Private university, private Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern t ...

in 1972, where he submitted a thesis titled "An Analytic Study of the Predictability of the Flow in a Dish-Pan Model of the Atmosphere". Later, he gained an M.S. and DSc in

environmental health Environmental health is the branch of public health concerned with all aspects of the natural and built environment affecting human health. In order to effectively control factors that may affect health, the requirements that must be met ...

from the Harvard School of Public Health.

Career

Dockery was appointed an assistant professor at HSPH in 1987, where he was promoted to associate professor in 1990 and full professor in 1998. In 2005, he became chair of the department of environmental health at HSPH. In 2008, he was appointed director of the Harvard-NIEHS Center for Environmental Health Sciences.

Research

In the 1970s and 80s, Dockery led the

Harvard Six Cities study The Harvard "Six Cities" study was a major epidemiological study of over 8,000 adults in six American cities that helped to establish the connection between fine-particulate air pollution (such as diesel engine soot) and reduced life expectancy ...

, the results of which were published in 1993 in the ''New England Journal of Medicine''. In the study, Dockery and his co-authors (including C. Arden Pope) reported that air pollution was associated with increased mortality. The results of this study have been used by the

Environmental Protection Agency A biophysical environment is a biotic and abiotic surrounding of an organism or population, and consequently includes the factors that have an influence in their survival, development, and evolution. A biophysical environment can vary in scale f ...

as the basis for their regulations on fine particulate matter in 1997, and, as of 2005, was the most-cited air-pollution study ever published. In 2009, Dockery co-authored another study which found that improvements in air quality in 51 American cities had led to life expectancies of people living there increasing by as much as five months.

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Dockery, Douglas W. American epidemiologists Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health faculty Living people University of Maryland, College Park alumni Massachusetts Institute of Technology School of Science alumni Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health alumni Year of birth missing (living people)