Graham was chair of UB's Department of Social and Preventive Medicine from 1981-91 and a member of that department for 35 years. The honorary doctorate recognizes his contributions to the university's research mission and to the body of knowledge on the relationship of diet and disease.

The conferral ceremony is part of the opening day festivities for the sesquicentennial celebration of UB's School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences.

Graham earned a bachelor's degree from Amherst College in 1943 and began studies in anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley. His studies were interrupted by a stint in the U.S. Army Counter Intelligence Corps, in which he served for three years as a special agent.

He returned to academics in 1946, this time at the University at Buffalo, and went on to receive master's and doctoral degrees from Yale University.

While his field was sociology, he became interested early on in public health issues. During his first teaching job, a three-year position as instructor of sociology at the Pennsylvania College for Women in Pittsburgh-now Chatham College-he spent a summer lecturing on the sociology of medicine at Penn State.

While in Pittsburgh, he served as a consultant to the University of Pittsburgh School of Public Health, and commenced a life-long career studying the interrelationships of human lifestyles and disease.

His first position in Buffalo was as director of community epidemiological studies at Roswell Park Cancer Institute, which he held from 1956-60. He served simultaneously as assistant professor in the UB Department of Preventive Medicine and Public Health, now the Department of Social and Preventive Medicine, and as a lecturer in UB's Department of Sociology and director of its doctoral program in medical sociology.

He was named an associate research scientist at Roswell Park in 1960, and was promoted to principal scientist in 1965.

Continuing his work in the epidemiology of disease, primarily cancer, he was promoted to full professor in 1966 in the UB departments of sociology and social and preventive medicine. He became chair of the Department of Social and Preventive Medicine in 1981 and served until 1991, when he was named professor emeritus.

Graham's publications in refereed journals dealing with public-health issues date back to 1956, when the journal Social Problems published his report on ethnic background and illness in a Pennsylvania county. Since then, he has published 144 journal articles resulting from his numerous research studies on socio-economic and dietary factors and their relationship to various types of cancer.

He remains involved in epidemiologic studies in the Department of Social and Preventive Medicine that are based on data collected during his long-term investigations of the social epidemiology of cancer. Graham's work was funded by the National Cancer Institute, and continues to yield important information on how diet and lifestyle factors affect the health of populations.

In 1991, the Society for Epidemiologic Research, of which Graham is past president, sponsored a symposium in his honor titled "Diet and the Epidemiology of Cancer." Additional honors and awards that he has received include the Stockton Kimball Award from the UB School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences in 1989 and the Distinguished Achievement Award from the American Society for Preventive Oncology in 1990

Graham has served on the editorial boards of several professional journals, including Nutrition and Cancer and American Journal of Epidemiology, and on numerous national advisory boards, committees and study sections.