Albert Hofman is the Stephen B. Kay Family Professor of Public Health and Clinical Epidemiology, and chair of the Department of Epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He received his MD from the University of Groningen and PhD from the Erasmus University Rotterdam. Hofman previously chaired the Department of Epidemiology at the Erasmus University Medical School and served as science director of the Netherlands Institute for Health Sciences.

An internationally recognized leader in the epidemiology of common neurologic and vascular diseases, Hofman specializes on dementia and stroke and has spearheaded studies on the role of vascular factors in the etiology of Alzheimer disease and genetic studies of complex diseases in large populations. His work applies advanced technologies such as MRI imaging and genomics to population-wide observational epidemiologic studies bearing on important clinical entities.

Hofman’s scholarly writing has been published in scientific journals including Circulation, New England Journal of Medicine, American Journal of Hypertension, Science, Nature, and the European Journal of Epidemiology, of which he is currently editor-in-chief. A member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, Hofman holds honorary doctorates from the University of Belgrade and University of Bern, and is the 2009 recipient of the Folksam Prize for Epidemiological Research from Stockholm’s Karolinska Institutet and holds a Knighthood of the Kingdom of The Netherlands.