Olshan named to UNC Lineberger leadership post
| November 27, 2012 | |
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Andrew F. Olshan, PhD, has been appointed UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center’s associate director of population sciences.
Dr. Andy Olshan
Olshan, professor and chair of epidemiology at Gillings School of Global Public Health at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, holds other leadership roles at UNC’s cancer center, including serving as head of the cancer epidemiology program and director for two core units, the Biospecimens Processing Facility and the Rapid Case Ascertainment Core. He also holds a joint appointment in UNC School of Medicine’s Department of Otolaryngology/Head and Neck Surgery. He joined UNC’s faculty in 1991. In his new senior leadership role at UNC Lineberger, Olshan will oversee development of population-based cancer research and its integration throughout the cancer center’s programs. He also will oversee several of the center’s core resources and two established scientific programs, cancer epidemiology and cancer prevention and control. “Dr. Olshan is an outstanding, nationally-recognized cancer epidemiologist who has conducted groundbreaking population-based studies in adult cancers as well as leading two large NCI-funded studies of childhood cancer,” said Shelton Earp, MD, UNC Lineberger director. “In addition to his major role as chair of one of the country’s premier epidemiology departments, he has taken time to fully interact with our prevention and control faculty, who are experts in cancer outcomes, health communication, behavioral intervention and community-based participatory prevention research.”
Earp, who also is Lineberger Professor of Cancer Research and professor of medicine and of pharmacology in UNC’s School of Medicine, said that Olshan had earned the respect of population science faculty members from across the university, citing Olshan’s active role in developing UNC Lineberger’s Integrated Cancer Information Surveillance Systems, his collaborations with prevention faculty members on Health-E-NC and his leadership in interacting with the North Carolina Central Cancer Registry.
“It is this public health research perspective that makes Dr. Olshan an ideal leader for the UNC Lineberger’s Population Science Program,” Earp said.
Olshan’s major research interests include the environmental and genetic epidemiology of cancer and reproductive, perinatal and pediatric outcomes. He has directed two North Carolina-based studies of head and neck cancer and three national studies of the etiology of childhood cancer. He is principal investigator at the North Carolina Center for Birth Defects Research and Prevention, where he leads a national genetic epidemiology study of neuroblastoma.
He has served on the National Cancer Institute’s Board of Scientific Counselors, NCI site visit teams, the NCI primary epidemiology study section and on external advisory boards of several comprehensive cancer centers. At UNC, he is a member of the Carolina Population Center and the UNC Center for Environmental Health and Susceptibility.
Olshan earned a doctorate in epidemiology at the University of Washington and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in medical genetics at the University of British Columbia. He serves on the editorial boards of the journals Cancer Medicine and Cancer Causes and Control and is an associate editor of the American Journal of Epidemiology, Cancer Research, and the International Journal of Molecular Epidemiology and Genetics.
UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health contact: David Pesci, director of communications, (919) 962-2600 or dpesci@unc.edu.
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