Professor Albert Hofman
Chair of the Department of Epidemiology
Stephen B. Kay Family Professor of Public Health and Clinical Epidemiology,
Harvard T H Chan School of Public Health
Boston, Massachusetts (USA)
Before moving to Harvard, Professor Hofman was chair of the Department of Epidemiology of the Erasmus Medical Center/Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands, from 1988 – 2016. Professor Hofman is the initiator and principal investigator of two population-based, prospective cohort studies in the Netherlands: the Rotterdam Study and the Generation R study. The study of multiple outcomes in these cohorts, in particular neurological, cardiovascular and endocrine diseases, has enabled the investigation of the interrelations of those diseases, and thereby of the co-morbidity and co-etiology of various diseases with a large population burden. The Rotterdam Study was one of the five founding cohorts of the very productive CHARGE consortium which has performed many successful genome-wide association studies that found a large number of genes involved in common diseases. The Rotterdam Study also pioneered new population imaging modalities, including magnetic resonance imaging since 1995. More recently the Generation R study has an MRI facility and is conducting one of the first large-scale populations based brain-imaging studies in children.