Scholars gathered from around the world to honor the career of Michael Bracken, the Susan Dwight Bliss Professor of Epidemiology; professor of neurology and of obstretrics, gynecology and reproductive sciences last Friday. Bracken is retiring from teaching this year after 48 years at the Yale School of Public Health, where he earned three degrees before joining the faculty in the early 1970s.
Bracken PhD, MPH, FACE, is widely known for establishing the field of perinatal epidemiology and for his research on spinal cord injuries. He is “one of the giants of public health,” said Dean Paul Cleary as he presented the honoree with a Yale chair in recognition of his long and fruitful career.
Bracken noted that his time at the Yale School of Public Health spanned nearly half of its 100-year history. Arriving in the United States in 1968 from Yorkshire, England, he was here during the infamous riots that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King, the 1970 Black Panther trials in New Haven and the founding of the first federally funded community health clinics in New Haven. He served with six deans and recalls eating lunch with YSPH’s then-retired Nobel laureate, Max Theiler.
“The Yale School of Public Health has been a wonderful place to have a career. I have enjoyed working with superb colleagues and teaching the best students who have gone on to make major contributions to epidemiology” he said.
Among the day’s presenters was Sir Iain Chalmers (Cochrane Collaboration and James Lind Initiative, Oxford, United Kingdom), who spoke via live stream from his office at Oxford University. Sir Iain and Bracken shared parallel trajectories in their early research on maternal and child health starting with important findings in the 1970s on the absence of any effects of induced abortion on subsequent pregnancies. By the mid 1980s they began collaboration on systematic reviews, leading to the establishment of the Cochrane Collaboration, and in 2014 they published a clarion paper that appeared in The Lancet on the need to reduce waste in biomedical research.
One of the giants of public health.
Dean Paul Cleary
Bracken is the founding director of the Yale Perinatal Epidemiology Unit and co-director of its successor, the Yale Center for Perinatal, Pediatric and Environmental Epidemiology. These research groups have collaborated with and mentored some 150 scholars since 1979. Many of these researchers presented their findings at the festschrift, including: Dr. Roger Soll (H. Wallace Professor of Neonatology at the College of Medicine, University of Vermont); Dr. Jessica Illuzzi (medical director of obstetrics, Vidone Birthing Center, Yale New-Haven Hospital and associate professor at the Yale School of Medicine); Dr. William Murk (senior scientist, Aetion); Dr. Andrew DeWan (associate professor of epidemiology, Yale School of Public Health); Dr. Elizabeth Hatch (professor of epidemiology, School of Public Health, Boston University); Dr. Audrey Saftlas (professor, College of Public Health, University of Iowa); Dr. Brenda Eskenazi, Jennifer and Brian Maxwell Professor Maternal and Child Health and Epidemiology, School of Public Health, University of California, Berkeley); Dr. Brian Leaderer (Susan Dwight Bliss Professor of Epidemiology, Yale School of Public Health); Dr. Janneane Gent (research scientist in epidemiology, Yale School of Public Health); Dr. Theodore Holford (Susan Dwight Bliss Professor of Public Health, Yale School of Public Health); Dr. Lisbet Lundsberg (associate research scientist, Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Sciences, Yale School of Medicine); Dr. Anne Marie Jukic (assistant professor of epidemiology, Yale School of Public Health); and Dr. Geir Jacobsen (professor emeritus, Department of Public Health and General Practice, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway).
Bracken has also served as head of Chronic Disease Epidemiology and vice chairman (deputy dean) of the Yale School of Public Health. He has published some 400 articles and authored three books. His first book, Perinatal Epidemiology, was published by Oxford University Press in 1984. Effective Care of the Newborn Infant (with J.C. Sinclair, 1992), also published by Oxford University Press, was named by the British Medical Journal as one of the most influential books in evidence-based medicine. His most recent book: Risk, Chance, and Causation: Investigating the Origins and Treatment of Disease was published by Yale University Press in 2013 and is written for the lay public.
Bracken has taught courses in evidence-based medicine and health care, pharmaco-epidemiology, perinatal epidemiology and general epidemiology at Yale. He has directed numerous epidemiological investigations, almost all funded (over $50 million) by the National Institutes of Health. He has served on numerous study sections and committees of the NIH including the Council of the National Institute of Deafness and Communicative Disorders. He chaired the first Congress of Epidemiology in 2001 and consults for many international corporations and agencies. He has served as president of both the American College of Epidemiology and the Society for Epidemiologic Research. Bracken is the 2013 recipient of the Lilienfeld Award from the American College of Epidemiology, the 2016 Gordon Lecture Award from NIH and a DSc honoris causa from the University of Gloucestershire, UK.