Walter W. Holland

Walter W. Holland (born 1929) is an epidemiologist and public health physician.

Walter Werner Holland was born on March 5, 1929 in Teplice-Sanov, Czechoslovakia. His parents were Henry Holland and Hertha Zentner. With the rise of Hitler the family fled to England in 1939.

He attended Rugby School and then went to St Thomas's Hospital Medical School where he qualified in medicine in 1954, having obtained a first degree in Physiology. He served in the Royal Air Force, attached to the Epidemiological Research Laboratory at Colindale and, after a further appointment as Lecturer to the Department of Medicine at St Thomas's, he was made MRC Clinical Research Fellow in the Department of Epidemiology and Medical Statistics at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. This was followed by a year in the Department of Epidemiology at Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and then his return to St Thomas's in 1962 and his appointment to Professor in 1968.

It was at St. Thomas's that Holland developed his academic reputation. He established the Department of Clinical Epidemiology and Social Medicine and then the associated Health Services Research Unit with core funding from the Department of Health. He assembled a large staff including epidemiologists, social scientists and statisticians. They conducted a large number of studies on epidemiology of chronic respiratory disease, blood pressure, smoking, air pollution and the application of epidemiologic principles to health services research.

He is Emeritus Professor of Public Health Medicine and Visiting Professor at London School of Economics.

Holland has had a very wide contribution to the development of epidemiology and public health. His groundbreaking paper on validation of medical screening procedures, published jointly with fellow epidemiologist Archie Cochrane in 1971, became a classic in the field.

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