Career
Early in his career, Paffenbarger engaged in polio research as an officer in the United States Public Health Service, focusing on the transmission and pathogenesis of polio. He worked with Dr. Jonas Salk to develop the first effective polio vaccine.
In the mid 1950s, he shifted to chronic disease epidemiology and the search for causes of mental illnesses associated with childbearing, site-specific cancers, and cardiovascular-hypertensive-metabolic diseases. After being urged by then President Dwight Eisenhower's physician to investigate heart disease, he began his landmark study of the relations between physical activity, chronic disease, and longevity.
Paffenbarger spent time at Harvard and the University of California, Berkeley, where he served as adjunct professor of epidemiology, before joining the faculty at the Stanford School of Medicine in 1977. He became emeritus in 1993 in health research and policy at Stanford, after which he returned to UC Berkeley to join the department of human biodynamics.
Paffenbarger died at the age of 84, at his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico on July 9, 2007 of heart failure.
Read more about this topic: Ralph Paffenbarger
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