Howard Hu

Biography

oward Hu, M.D., M.P.H., Sc.D., came to the University of Toronto as the Dalla Lana School of Public Health’s second permanent director and professor of environmental health, epidemiology, and global health in July 2012. On July 1, 2013, after leading the school through the process of becoming the first new faculty at the University of Toronto in 15 years, he became the school’s founding dean. Dr. Hu is a physician-scientist, trained as an internist, occupational and environmental medicine specialist, and epidemiologist. Previously, he had been a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health and the Channing Laboratory of the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts (1988 to 2006) and then the NSF International Chair of the Department of Environmental Health Sciences and professor of environmental health, epidemiology and internal medicine at the University of Michigan (2006 to 2012). Dr. Hu is the founder of an environmental epidemiology research group that, since 1990, has grown into a multi-institutional and international team of scientists devoted to gaining new insights into the impact of exposure to potentially toxicants that are of critical importance to public health and medicine. Dr. Hu has published more than 250 original papers in the scientific literature, co-authored and edited several books, and served as the founding medical editor of Environmental Health Perspectives, the official journal of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS). His work has won a number of awards, including the 1999 NIEHS Progress and Achievement Award, the 2006 Harriett Hardy Award, the 2009 Linus Pauling Lifetime Achievement Award, and the 2011 Award of Excellence from the American Public Health Association. He has served on the Institute of Medicine’s Board of Population Health and Public Health Practice and currently serves on the National Advisory Environmental Health Sciences Council for the National Institutes for Health. Dr. Hu received his Sc.B. from Brown University, his M.D. from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and his M.P.H. and Sc.D. degrees (epidemiology) from the Harvard School of Public Health. He trained in internal medicine at Boston City Hospital and in occupational/environmental medicine at Harvard.   

Research Interest

 internal medicine