October 21, 2004

Feinberg scholar Stamler will be honored

Jeremiah Stamler — the foremost authority on the role of salt and fatty foods in hypertension and cardiovascular disease and professor emeritus at the Feinberg School of Medicine — will be honored by Northwestern for his 55 years of contributions to the field of preventive medicine.

Jeremiah Stamler has been in the medical school community since 1958.

photo by Jim Ziv

The Feinberg School will honor Stamler Oct. 30-31 at a Festschrift — a German word signifying celebration — and establish a fund in his name to continue work in this field.

The event, which also celebrates Stamler’s 85th birthday, will feature leading scholars, colleagues, friends and former students. The celebration features a gala dinner Oct. 30 and scientific presentations Oct. 31.

The dinner speaker will be Sir Michael Marmot, M.D., director of the International Centre for Health and Society at the University College, London. Reports of new research will be given by Philip Greenland, M.D., Harry W. Dingman Professor of Cardiology and chair of preventive medicine, and Martha Daviglus, M.D., Kiang Liu and Linda Van Horn, faculty members in preventive medicine and leading researchers from other institutions.

Stamler’s groundbreaking work in population-based research and preventive clinical trials has substantially advanced cardiovascular disease prevention and treatment on an international scale. His body of work encompasses more than 1,000 published papers and monographs in studies that include research trials on estrogen, multiple risk factor intervention, primary prevention of hypertension, aspirin and dipyridamole, systolic hypertension in the elderly, effects of dietary patterns on blood pressure and coronary prevention with lovastatin, as well as the Chicago Coronary Prevention Evaluation Program, Coronary Drug Project, National Diet-Heart Study, and Hypertension Detection and Follow-up Program.

Stamler has been a part of Northwestern’s medical school community since 1958, when he joined the department of medicine as an assistant professor and was also named director of the Chicago Board of Health’s new Heart Disease Control Program.

He became the first chair of the newly created department of community health and preventive medicine at Northwestern in 1972, a position he held for 16 years. Stamler, who developed the school’s Master in Public Health program, was the distinguished Dingman Professor of Cardiology at the medical school from 1973 to 1990. He also served as chair of the department of community health and preventive medicine at Northwestern Memorial Hospital before becoming professor emeritus.

Stamler has lectured extensively in the U.S. and abroad on the causes of the CHD-CVD epidemic and approaches to its prevention and control. 

He has continued his leadership role in preventive clinical trials, population-based research and public policy and is now actively involved in several large-scale, long-term studies.