Walter Holland was a giant of public health research: a pioneer in the field of UK health services, public health and epidemiology. He was renowned for bringing a historical perspective to practical policy questions. A doctor by training, he established the Department of Clinical Epidemiology and Social Medicine and subsequently the acclaimed Health Services Research Unit at St Thomas’s Hospital.
Holland’s prodigious outputs across the public health field shifted thinking on evidence-based policy and put avoidable mortality on the map. While at St Thomas’s, Holland established close links with pioneering social scientists at the LSE including Richard Titmuss and Brian Abel-Smith. After appointments at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and Johns Hopkins and a return to St Thomas’s, Holland ultimately joined his social science colleagues becoming Emeritus Professor of Public Health Medicine and a Visiting Professor at the LSE until his death in 2018.
You can read more about Holland and his contribution to research at the LSE and beyond in the LSE blog published to celebrate his achievements and his obituary in the Lancet.
The Department has named two prizes in his memory: the Walter Holland Prize for Best Dissertation and the Walter Holland Prize for Best Overall Performance are awarded annually to students on the Global Health MSc.
Click here to see previous winners
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