Heather Joanne Baer, ScD

Heather J. Baer, ScD, is an Associate Epidemiologist in the Division of General Medicine and Primary Care at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and an Instructor in Epidemiology at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health. She received her Doctor of Science in Epidemiology from the Harvard School of Public Health in 2005 and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in Cancer Epidemiology at the Channing Laboratory from 2005 to 2006. She assumed her current position in the Division of General Medicine and Primary Care in October of 2007.

Dr. Baer’s research focuses on the role of lifestyle factors in the etiology and prevention of chronic disease. She has conducted a number of analyses within the Nurses’ Health Study cohorts to examine how factors such as obesity, diet, and physical activity affect risk of breast and ovarian cancer and overall mortality in women. She is currently conducting a pilot study in BWH primary care practices to evaluate use of a web-based risk assessment tool for collecting information on lifestyle factors and family history from patients before seeing their physician. She also has been involved in several studies examining documentation and diagnosis of overweight and obesity in children. Building on this work, she recently received a Mentored Research Scientist Career Development award to develop and evaluate tools within electronic health records to help primary care clinicians with the assessment and management of overweight and obesity in adults. In addition to her research, Dr. Baer is actively involved in teaching activities. She plays a major role in the Program in Clinical Effectiveness, an intensive, seven-week summer program that trains physicians in the quantitative skills for conducting clinical research. She is an Associate Director for Introduction to Clinical Epidemiology and teaches in several other courses, including Introductory Statistics for Medical Research and Analytical Aspects of Clinical Epidemiology. She also serves as a co-Director of the Summer MPH Practicum in Clinical Effectiveness and the MPH Seminar in Applied Research in Clinical Epidemiology during the academic year.

Selected publications

• Baer HJ, Colditz GA, Rosner B, Michels KB, Rich-Edwards JW, Hunter DJ, Willett WC.  Body fatness during childhood and adolescence and incidence of breast cancer in premenopausal women: a prospective cohort study. Breast Cancer Research 2005;7:R314-25.
• Baer HJ, Colditz GA, Willett WC, Dorgan JF. Adiposity and sex hormones in girls. Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev 2007; 16: 1880-8.
• Baer HJ, Hankinson SE, Tworoger SS. Body size in early life and risk of epithelial ovarian cancer: results from the Nurses’ Health Studies. Br J Cancer 2008; 99: 1916-22.
• Benson L, Baer HJ, Kaelber DC. Trends in the diagnosis of overweight and obesity in children and adolescents: 1999-2007. Pediatrics 2009; 123: e153-8.
• Benson L, Baer HJ, Greco PJ, Kaelber DC.  When is family history obtained? Lack of timely documentation of family history among overweight and hypertensive paediatric patients. Journal of Paediatrics and Child Health 2010 (in press).