Noel Weiss & Tom Koepsell

For more than 40 years, Dr. Noel S. Weiss has instructed graduate students at the UW on the core methods of epidemiology. During this time, Dr. Weiss has mentored hundreds of students conducting their thesis or dissertation research, and he received the UW School of Public Health Outstanding Teaching Award in 1992. In 1999, he was the first winner of the UW Landolt Award for Outstanding Graduate Mentor, and in 2011 was the first winner of the Evans Award for Teaching and Mentoring from the North American Congress of Epidemiology. In 2017, he received the American Public Health Association Abraham Lilienfeld Award, having in 2007 won an award with the same name from the American College of Epidemiology. From 1984-1993, Dr. Weiss served as Chair of the Department of Epidemiology. Dr. Weiss is also a researcher at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and has been there since 1973 (the year he joined the faculty of the UW). His current research focuses on cancer epidemiology, clinical epidemiology, and epidemiologic methods.

Dr. Thomas Koepsell has applied epidemiologic research techniques to evaluating health promotion and disease prevention programs. He has nearly three decades of experience in teaching epidemiologic methods at the graduate level and has received three prizes for outstanding teaching, including the University of Washington (UW) School of Public Health and Community Medicine Outstanding Teaching Award (1987) and the UW Distinguished Teaching Award (1990). He has conducted research on a wide variety of non-infectious diseases, including injuries, Alzheimer’s disease and other neurological conditions, obesity, and arthritis, with an overarching interest in epidemiologic methodology. He was chair of the UW Department of Epidemiology from 1993 to 1998. The American Public Health Association (APHA) honored Dr. Koepsell with the Abraham Lilienfeld Award in 1994. Dr. Koepsell was president of SER from 2002 to 2003.