New Associate Director Tapped for NIH Office of Disease Prevention
David M. Murray, Ph.D., chair and professor of the Division of Epidemiology at Ohio State University's College of Public Health, will join NIH in September.
David M. Murray, Ph.D., chair and professor of the Division of Epidemiology at Ohio State University's College of Public Health, will join the National Institutes of Health soon as associate director for Disease Prevention and director of the Office of Disease Prevention (ODP). NIH Director Francis S. Collins, MD, Ph.D., said Murray is expected to join the NIH on Sept. 23, 2012.
"This is an exciting time for research in disease prevention and health promotion, which is gaining more and more visibility at the NIH," Collins said. "I am confident that Dr. Murray’s experience will be a strong complement to the mission of the ODP."
The office is the lead NIH unit for fostering research on disease prevention and health promotion, and also for disseminating the results of that research to improve public health. Murray "has spent his career evaluating intervention programs designed to improve the public health. In particular, Dr. Murray has focused on the design and analysis of group-randomized trials in which identifiable social groups are randomized to conditions and members of those groups are observed to assess the effect of an intervention. He also conducts research to develop and test new methods for their analysis," according to the NIH announcement.
He has a B.A. in psychology from Denison University and a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Tennessee. NIH has provided much of his research support, and he was the first chair of the Community-Level Health Promotion study section at the NIH. He has sat on NIH review committees of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute; the National Cancer Institute; and the National Institute on Drug Abuse and has worked on more than 40 NIH-funded grants and contracts.
Murray is a fellow in the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a member of the American Public Health Association, the American Statistical Association, the Society for Epidemiologic Research, and the Society for Prevention Research.