Harvey Risch

Harvey Risch is Professor Emeritus of Epidemiology in the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health at the Yale School of Public Health and Yale School of Medicine. Dr. Risch received his MD degree from the University of California San Diego and PhD, in mathematical modeling of infectious epidemics, from the University of Chicago. After serving as a postdoctoral fellow in epidemiology at the University of Washington, Dr. Risch was a faculty member in epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of Toronto before coming to Yale. Dr. Risch’s research interests are in the areas of cancer etiology, prevention and early diagnosis, and in epidemiologic methods. He is especially interested in the effects of reproductive factors, diet, genetic predisposition, histopathologic factors, occupational/environmental/medication exposures, infection and immune functioning in cancer etiology. His major research projects have included studies of ovarian cancer, pancreas cancer, lung cancer, bladder cancer, esophageal and stomach cancer, and of cancers related to usage of oral contraceptives and noncontraceptive estrogens. Dr. Risch is Associate Editor of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, Editor of the International Journal of Cancer, and for six years was a Member of the Board of Editors, the American Journal of Epidemiology. Dr. Risch is an author of more than 400 original peer-reviewed research publications in the medical literature and those research papers have been cited by other scientific publications more than 46,000 times. Dr. Risch has an h-index of 102 and is a Member of the Connecticut Academy of Sciences and Engineering.