Julie E. Buring, ScD

Dr. Julie E. Buring is a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women‘s Hospital and a professor of epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

The primary focus of Dr. Buring’s research is the epidemiology of the prevention of chronic diseases, especially cardiovascular disease and cancer, with a primary methodologic focus on randomized clinical trials. Dr. Buring has been involved in the design, conduct, analysis and interpretation of a number of large-scale randomized clinical trials and their observational follow-up. She served as the principal investigator of the Women’s Health Study trial, evaluating the balance of benefits and risks of low-dose aspirin and vitamin E in the primary prevention of cardiovascular disease and cancer among 40,000 female health professionals. She is currently co-principal investigator of the extended observational follow-up of the participants. She also served as co-principal investigator of VITAL, a completed trial of vitamin D and fish oil in the primary prevention of cardiovascular disease and cancer among 26,000 participants, which is in the observational follow-up phase. She has also served as co-investigator of the Physicians' Health Study, which evaluated in large-scale randomized trials the preventive roles of low-dose aspirin, beta-carotene, vitamin E, vitamin C and a multivitamin on cardiovascular disease, cancer, vision and cognitive function.

Dr. Buring has longstanding and substantial commitments to teaching and training in epidemiology, both nationally and internationally. She serves as chair of the Harvard Medical School Institutional Review Board (IRB).