Hans-Olov Adami

Hans-Olov Adami (born July 14, 1942) is a Swedish physician, academic and public health researcher. He established the largest epidemiologic and biostatistics research unit in Sweden, the Department of Medical Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the Karolinska Institutet. He is a former chair of the Department of Epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, US.

Biography

Adami was born in Solna, Sweden. He attended the Östra Real School in Stockholm, and then graduated from the secondary school in Skellefteå. He studied medicine at Uppsala University (M.D. in 1969), where he also defended his thesis in 1978 (surgery). In 1990, Adami became Professor of Cancer Epidemiology at Uppsala University, where he established a research group known as cancer epidemiology that became the newly established Department of Cancer Epidemiology at Uppsala University in 1994. In 1997 he and the entire department moved to Karolinska Institutet where he became Chair of a new department entitled Medical Epidemiology known as MEP. Beginning in 1999 he started to establish a biostatistics research facility and the department's name changed to Medical Epidemiology and Biostatistics (MEB) which grew to become the largest epidemiology and biostatistics research facility in the country. The department has since expanded to research areas outside of cancer epidemiology.

At the Harvard School of Public Health, he was adjunct full professor between 1992 and 2007, after which he became chair at the Department of Epidemiology at Harvard until 2011. He is currently Emeritus Professor at Karolinska Institutet and at Harvard but employed part-time in the Clinical Effectiveness Research Group at the University of Oslo.