Rodrick Wallace at Age 70: Career in Epidemiology

Rodrick Wallace’s career, which has combined advances in methodology and substance and commitment to saving lives and communities, is being celebrated in a festschrift on Oct. 17. Some career highlights are described below. Please email Deborah Wallace at rdwall@ix.netcom.com for details about the festschrift.

Rod began PhD studies in physics at Columbia in 1969 and organized picketing RRI, a weapons lab, where he learned that the Lindsey administration hired military firms as urban consultants. Research on these consultancies opened a new career: urban systems and public health research.

Flawed mathematical models by NYC-Rand Institute dictated closing fire companies in poor neighborhoods and generated a fire epidemic. Rod assessed impacts of this neighborhood destruction. The resulting publications contributed greatly to social epidemiology and network theory in public health and safety.

A research scientist at NYS Psychiatric Institute, Rod received a Robert Wood Johnson Investigator Award in 1995, co-authoring A Plague on Your Houses: How New York City Was Burned Down and National Public Health Crumbled.  He explored hierarchical spread of disease and violence through metropolitan regions and through the national network of metropolitan regions.

Recently, Rod modeled cognition: psychological, immune system, genetic and epigenetic, community (how communities recognize situations and decide on courses of action), and subcellular chemical in diseases such as Alzheimer’s and diabetes, adding social, political and economic factors as determinants of intertwined evolution of genes and culture. He revealed the association between loss of manufacturing jobs and the obesity epidemic and between power relations and a spectrum of chronic diseases.

Submitted by Deborah Wallace