Leslie Bernstein, Ph.D., director of the Division of Cancer Etiology, has received the American College of Epidemiology’s Abraham Lilienfeld Award in recognition of her outstanding lifetime contributions to and leadership in the field of epidemiology.
 Leslie Bernstein (Photo ©2007 Philip Channing) |
The Lilienfeld Award is the highest honor the organization bestows and traditionally is given to researchers driving key advances in epidemiology. It was presented at the organization’s annual meeting, scheduled in San Francisco from Sept. 12 to 14. Bernstein, only the fifth woman to receive the award since it was established nearly a quarter century ago, gave a talk at the college’s awards luncheon on Sept. 14.
The award is named after a pioneer in the field. Lilienfeld, who held both a medical doctorate and a master’s in public health, was a longtime professor and chair of the Department of Epidemiology in the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. He was recognized internationally as an expert in cancer research and as a pioneer in developing epidemiological methods for the study of chronic diseases. He helped found the American College of Epidemiology in 1979, serving as its first president, and mentored many of the field’s early leaders.
“It is a great honor to be recognized with an award recognizing leadership in our discipline,” Bernstein said. “Dr. Lilienfeld wrote some of the seminal texts in epidemiology and set a benchmark for quality research and teaching that we strive to attain.”
Bernstein also has set standards within the field. Her research primarily has focused on how personal and lifestyle factors affect risk of breast cancer and other malignancies including non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. She has studied how such lifestyle factors influence disease prognosis and quality of life among survivors, as well.
She contributes to national and international research, serving as a chair or member of several advisory committees for studies significant to women’s health.
Throughout her career, she has received numerous honors for her investigations into cancer, including the American Society for Preventive Oncology’s Distinguished Achievement Award, the American Association for Cancer Research’s AACR-Prevent Cancer Foundation Award for Excellence in Cancer Prevention Research and the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation Brinker Award for Scientific Distinction in Clinical Breast Cancer Research. The National Cancer Institute most recently honored her with its Rosalind E. Franklin Award, which recognizes the commitment of women to cancer research, in January.
