David Hunter

David Hunter studied medicine at the University of Sydney, before moving to Harvard University for 33 years where he was the Vincent L. Gregory Professor of Cancer Prevention.  He is the Richard Doll Professor of Epidemiology and Medicine, and director of the Harvard-Oxford Program in Epidemiology.   His early research was on HIV transmission in East Africa, and subsequently he was involved in collaborative studies of nutrition and HIV pathogenesis, while also studying diet and cancer etiology in large scale prospective studies and founding the Pooling Project of Prospective Studies of Diet and Cancer. 

As Director of the Harvard Center for Cancer Prevention he developed a sample handling and genotyping laboratory to explore genetic associations with cancer, and gene-environment interactions.  He founded the Program in Genetic Epidemiology and Statistical Genetics at Harvard. He was co-chair of the steering committee of the NCI Breast and Prostate Cancer Cohort Consortium (BPC3) between 2003 and 2012, was co-director of the NCI Cancer Genetic Susceptibility Markers project focused on genome-wide association studies, and was an Eminent Scholar at the NCI between 2004 and 2009.

From 2009-2016 he was Dean for Academic Affairs at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, and in 2015-2016 he was Acting Dean.  He is one of about 3000 “highly cited researchers” worldwide according to Thomson-Reuters.