Dr. Eva S. Schernhammer is Professor and Chair of the Department of Epidemiology at the Medical University of Vienna, Adjunct Professor at the Department of Epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Lecturer on Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and Associate Faculty member at the Complexity Science Hub Vienna. She is one of the founders of ASciNA (Austrian Scientists in North America), where she served many years as President and Board member. She has been associated faculty at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health since 2003. Eva holds a Doctor of Medicine degree from the University of Vienna Medical School, a Doctor of Public Health degree (epidemiology) from the Harvard School of Public Health, as well as a Master of Philosophy (Mag Phil) degree in psychology from the University of Vienna. She completed her medical training in Vienna and practiced for several years in hematology/oncology before moving to Boston, MA, where she lived and worked from 1999 through 2015.
Eva is best known for her studies on disturbances of the circadian clock and their role in human health. She is one of the pioneers of circadian epidemiology and leads a group of scientists at Harvard who study these concepts, using longitudinal population studies. Her projects center around the complexity and fragility of the circadian system in humans, incorporating biomarkers, and transgenerational-, gender-, and age-specific aspects into her research, applying standard and advanced statistical and mathematical modelling. More broadly, her work centers around the detection of an increased risk of disease due to lifestyle factors, including nutrition, and environmental stressors, as well as the complex interaction between genetics and environmental factors in the disease process. During the recent COVID-19 pandemic, her work has shifted attention to the particularities of infectious disease epidemiology. Together with a distinguished group of scientists from around the world, including her own research group at the Department of Epidemiology in the Center for Public Health of the Medical University Vienna, she studied the characteristics of outbreaks and deliberated their potentially far-reaching consequences. Eva’s work has received several international awards and is frequently featured on media around the globe. She has more than 300 publications and an h-index of 90. She has been elected Member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences since 2024, and Member of Academia Europaea and the European Academy of Arts and Sciences since 2022.