AARON E. BLAIR

Chair, Membership Committee

Dr. Blair is Chief of the Occupational Epidemiology Branch of the Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics, National Cancer Institute.  His research has focused on cancer risks from agricultural exposures, industrial chemicals, physical inactivity, occupational exposures among women, and methodolological issues in occupational epidemiology.  

He has evaluated the risk of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, leukemia, and multiple myeloma among farmers in the first case-control studies to obtain detailed information on pesticides used and application practices.  This work has culminated the development of the Agricultural Health Study, a long-term prospective study of 90,000 farmers and their spouses in Iowa and North Carolina, designed to investigate cancer and other diseases associated with agricultural exposures and lifestyle.  His studies of cancer mortality among workers exposed to the important industrial chemicals formaldehyde and acrylonitrile were among the first to employ sophisticated algorithms to develop quantitative estimates of exposure in multi-company studies.  He has evaluated cancer risks among women in studies of dry cleaners and aircraft maintenance workers.  Methodological studies have focused on confounding, meta-analysis, and misclassification in exposure assessment.  

Dr. Blair has served on IARC Monograph Working Groups, Environmental Protection Science Advisory Panel Subgroup, and on Organizing Committees for Conferences on Assessment of Smoking in Occupational Studies, Exposure Assessment in Occupational Investigations, and Physical Activity and Cancer.  He has served on Editorial Boards of the American Journal of Epidemiology, Scandinavian Journal of Work, Environment and Health, and the Journal of Agricultural Safety and Health.  Besides being a Fellow and Board Member of ACE, Dr. Blair is also a member of the American Epidemiologic Society.