Professor Emeritus Receives Harvard Alumni Merit Award.
Richard Clapp, professor emeritus of environmental health, has received the Alumni Award of Merit from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s Alumni Association. He will be honored at the annual Alumni Award of Merit dinner at the Harvard Club of Boston on September 20.
An internationally renowned leader in environmental health and environmental epidemiology for more than 40 years, Clapp has dedicated his career to helping citizens develop solutions to public health problems. He has been recognized for his research contributions, teaching, and service to communities affected by cancer clusters linked to environmental pollution and workplace hazards.
Clapp says that while receiving the award is gratifying, he views it as recognition of the larger environmental and occupational health movement.
“I’m proud to have been part of it and to have helped guide the next generation of public health advocates,” he says.
The Alumni Award of Merit is presented to alumni whose activities reflect the Harvard Chan School’s commitment to public health activism, research, and teaching. In announcing the award, the Alumni Association wrote that Clapp has “maintained the highest standards of scientific integrity in public health practice and data collection, analysis, and reporting—even when corporations acted to suppress his findings on environmental causes of cancer.”
He was also instrumental in founding the Massachusetts Cancer Registry at the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, and served as the registry’s first director from 1980 to 1989.
Clapp taught at the School of Public Health for almost 20 years, beginning in 1992 as an assistant professor of environmental health, then becoming a full-time professor for the department. Since 2004, he has served as a senior environmental health scientist at the Lowell Center for Sustainable Production at the University of Massachusetts–Lowell, where he conducts and supervises epidemiologic data analyses, literature reviews, and technical assistance in community-based environmental health studies. He has also established community-university partnerships to improve environmental public health and link it to economic development.
Clapp received his Master of Public Health from the Harvard Chan School in 1974 and his Doctor of Science in epidemiology from SPH in 1989.