Mediterranean diet topic of Graham Lecture

BUFFALO, N.Y. – Maurizio Trevisan, founding dean of the University at Buffalo School of Public Health and Health Professions and an expert on how lifestyle and metabolic factors help cause or prevent cardiovascular disease, is returning to UB to give the 2013 Saxon Graham lecture on April 12.

He will discuss “The Mediterranean Diet: An Historical Perspective and Where We Are Now” at noon in 144 Farber Hall, UB South Campus. The talk is free and open to the public. Light refreshments will be served at 11:30 a.m.

Trevisan, currently dean of the Sophie Davis School of Biomedical Education and interim provost of the City College of New York, is former chair of the UB Department of Social and Preventive Medicine. While at UB, he achieved the rank of SUNY Distinguished Professor. Trevisan’s research focuses on the role of lifestyle and metabolic factors in cardiovascular disease, with a special focus on diet and alcohol use.

The lecture’s organizers note with great sadness that this will be the first of these lectures that Graham will not attend: He passed away last May.  

“It is fitting that Dr. Trevisan will present this lecture, as it has been 10 years since the School of Public Health and Health Professions was established in 2003 and 100 years since the Division of Hygiene and Sanitation was first established at UB in 1913,” says Jo Freudenheim, chair of the Department of Social and Preventive Medicine, which sponsors the Graham lecture.

Trevisan was recruited to UB by Graham, and served as chair of the Department of Social and Preventive Medicine after Graham retired. They remained close colleagues.

Graham, an accomplished epidemiologist, chaired the Department of Social and Preventive Medicine from 1981 to 1991. He is known for his important contributions to the understanding of the impact of diet on cancer, many of which were based on studying dietary habits of Western New Yorkers. The department continues Graham’s legacy of using epidemiologic tools to investigate the causes and prevention of diseases in human populations in Western New York and elsewhere.