David J. Hunter
David Hunter’s principal research interests are the etiology of cancer, particularly breast, prostate, pancreas and skin cancers. He is an investigator on the Nurses’ Health Study, a long-running cohort of 121,000 US women, and was project director for the Nurses’ Health Study II, a newer cohort of 116,000 women. He also analyzes inherited susceptibility to cancer and other chronic diseases using molecular techniques and gene-environment interactions. This work is largely based in subcohorts of the Nurses Health Study and the Health Professionals Follow-up Study of approximately 33,000 women and 18,000 men who have given a blood sample that can be used for DNA analysis. Dr. Hunter supervised laboratories at the Harvard School of Public Health in which gene sequence information from these samples is obtained.
Dr. Hunter has also studied HIV transmission for over twenty years, initially in Kenya and then in Tanzania. He has collaborated with investigators in Dar-es-Salaam to understand the relationship of nutritional status to progression of HIV disease and perinatal transmission.
Professor Hunter was the Director of the Harvard Center for Cancer Prevention from 1997-2003. In June of 2009, he was appointed Dean for Academic Affairs at the School. He is also the Vincent L. Gregory Professor of Cancer Prevention. He is the founding Director of the Harvard Chan School’s Program in Molecular and Genetic Epidemiology and is Principal Investigator of a number of ongoing breast and prostate cancer studies. He co-chaired the Steering Committee of the NCI Breast and Prostate Cancer Cohort Consortium, was co-Director of the NCI Cancer Genetic Markers of Susceptibility (CGEMS) Special Initiative, and was a member of the Board of Scientific Counselors of the National Cancer Institute. He is contact Principal Investigator of the DRIVE (Discovery, Biology and Risk of Inherited Variants in Breast Cancer) Consortium.
As Dean for Academic Affairs he has led the Harvard Chan School strategy for developing HarvardX and other online courses. Over 250,000 students have enrolled in one or more of these courses, and over 15,000 have received Certificates of Completion. In 2015 HSPH will offer a blended residential and online MPH in Epidemiology, the first such Master’s degree at Harvard University.