Faculty Profiles

Yuanli Liu
Heather Nelson
Stephen Buka
Barbara Burleigh
Eric Rimm
Karen Kuntz

Department &
Center Highlights

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Driving all night from his family's farm in Watertown, Wisconsin, his worldly goods packed into a U-Haul trailer, Eric Rimm pulled into Boston at 6 a.m. one fall day in 1986, one of only four students bound for the doctoral program in epidemiology at HSPH. Rimm, with a degree in computer science, was just 22 years old; the rest were mid-career professionals. "I was wowed and intimidated," he recalls.

But Rimm had a few things going for him. Raised in a family where, he says, "You could do anything in life--after you got your Ph.D.," he was gifted in science and math. Searching for a career that would play to his strong suits, Rimm glimpsed his future when his father, a university professor, brought him along to a conference in epidemiology. Rimm took to the field, which mines populations for links between diseases and factors that influence people's risk of developing them.

At HSPH, Rimm stood out. One of his instructors, Walter Willett, now head of the Department of Nutrition, needed a new director for the Health Professionals Follow-up Study post haste. "You can handle data," he told Rimm. Soon the student found himself supervising eight people and managing, for Willett and fellow epidemiologists Meir Stampfer and Graham Colditz, the analysis of information reported by 50,000-plus study participants.
At the time, heart disease was where the action was. "The relationship between coronary heart disease and alcohol was controversial," says Rimm, "but our data set was able to clarify the issue." In a landmark Lancet paper, Rimm wrote in 1991 that "In a nutshell, after accounting for all other factors, we found a strong association between having one to two drinks a day and a reduced risk of heart disease."

Between talks at universities across the country, Rimm continued to mine the data. He led a seminal study of heart disease and drinking patterns. He studied alcohol and aspects of diet as well as obesity, hypertension, and diabetes. Moreover, he delved into the mechanisms--the hows and whys--underlying these associations, looking at clotting factors and blood lipids to explain how alcohol might curb heart attack risk.

Rimm also wrote papers on the relationship between heart disease and body-fat distribution. Noting that his dad had been the first to relate chronic disease to the waist/hip ratio, Rimm explains, "As men age, obesity overall may not be as important as obesity around the middle. Owing to biologic changes and exercising less, men tend to lose muscle; fat gain occurs disproportionately at the waist." His and others' research led to the important finding that, as men grow older, they should supplement cardiovascular exercise with weight training.
What Rimm practices today is not his father's epidemiology.
"Fifteen years ago, we looked for simple associations between disease and factors like vitamin intake or cholesterol levels," says Rimm, who joined the HSPH faculty in 1993. "Today's students need a grasp of genetics, in order to study the interactions between diet, existing health conditions, and genetically determined predisposition. We can extract DNA from blood and study natural variations in genes called polymorphisms that might account for why one person develops a disease while another doesn't.

"All of nutrition may go this way," Rimm asserts. "We can't expect that one nutrient--folate, say--will operate the same way in everyone."

Genes that govern nutrient and alcohol metabolism are among Rimm's chief interests now. "Our genes help explain why, when we drink alcohol, HDL cholesterol rises--but not equally in every individual. I think we'll find that drinking, even in moderation, isn't right for everyone."

Rimm is also looking ahead to looming global health threats like obesity and hypertension, aiming to drill down with increasing precision to their causal factors. "We'll study the relationship between protein and carbohydrate quality on the risk for obesity and heart disease," he says. "Looking at the relationship between whole-grain foods and heart disease, we'll measure consumption in terms of grams of bran, germ, and total whole grain, not just servings, as others have done."

Cranking out papers won't satisfy the prolific Rimm, whose research aims to influence health policy and, consequently, how people live their lives. "It's not easy to retrain health professionals, let alone the public," Rimm concedes. "But as the evidence from research builds, my convictions will only become more passionate."

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Photo: Kent Dayton