Pietro (Pier) Alberto Bertazzi

Pietro (Pier) Alberto Bertazzi, MD, MPH graduated in Medicine in 1971 at the Milan University, Italy. During his medical residency he had the opportunity to address health problems related to occupation, and this opened his scientific and medical interests to the study of the health determinants characterizing environments where people live and work. He completed his training at the UNC School of Public Health in Chapel Hill, NC and at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, Cincinnati, OH. His main  field of research and teaching has been the use of   epidemiology methods for the study, recognition and prevention of work- and environment-related diseases. To this end, he also established a molecular epidemiology lab where biologists, epidemiologists, statisticians, physicians and other scientists work together. One major result was the US-Italy collaborative case-control study on “Environment And Genetics in Lung cancer Etiology-EAGLE”. Environmental epigenetics was the latest development of his  research. He was temporary advisor to several international organizations (WHO, EU, ILO-BIT, IPCS). In the mid-eighties, he became professor at the Milan State University Medical School where he was later appointed director of the Department of Clinical Sciences and Community Health with a joint appointment at the Department of Preventive Medicine of the Milan Fondazione Ca’ Granda Policlinico Hospital.