HPH NOW, Sept 29, 2006, Former NIEHS Chief Is Visiting Professor

Kenneth Olden

Kenneth Olden, former Director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) for nearly 14 years, has joined HSPH as Yerby Visiting Professor in Environmental Health.

In an announcement about the appointment, Dean Barry Bloom described how Olden's leadership of NIEHS broke new ground. He was an early voice in asserting that human health and chronic disease are the result of gene-environment interactions. He was the first African-American to direct one of the 18 institutes of the NIH, and he strove to broaden the research undertaken by NIEHS, working to include large-scale human studies that could shed light on environmental and genetic factors in disease. He embraced the results of the mapping of the human genome as an avenue toward describing how environmental agents change biological functions.

Olden drew national attention to the striking health disparities that exist in the U.S. among racial and ethnic groups and between genders. He became an advocate for the role that community groups can play in collaborating with research institutions to identify and address environmental health problems.

At HSPH, Olden said that he wants to engage students, researchers, and community groups in a discussion about the best way to provide a population-based health care delivery system that offers the same basic quality of care to everyone.

"One of the factors that has been neglected in the discussion of health disparities is how the health care delivery system itself -the doctor-patient model of health care delivery-contributes," Olden said. "We have focused on the social aspects of this issue, such as poverty and racism, but even after taking those into consideration, the health care delivery system doesn't work for many Americans, irrespective of race or class."

"Dr. Olden has given a strong and determined voice to those left most vulnerable and beset by environmental health problems," said Dean Bloom.

Olden views Harvard as the perfect place to generate discussion and research about how to reach his goals. "Leadership and critical thinking in public health is coming from HSPH," said Olden.

Last year, HSPH awarded Olden its highest honor with the Julius B. Richmond Award, named after the former U.S. Surgeon General and Harvard emeritus professor. A cell biologist and biochemist, Olden received his PhD from Temple University in 1970. He is the former director of the Howard University Cancer Center and former professor and chair of the Department of Oncology at Howard University Medical School in Washington, D.C. He is a member of the Institute of Medicine, and, in 1991, was appointed by then-President George H.W. Bush to the National Cancer Advisory Board.

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