The George S. Pepper Professorship of Public Health & Preventive Medicine
The Professorship was established in 1890 through the bequest of George S. Pepper (1808–1890), an esteemed philanthropist committed to the betterment of Philadelphia’s cultural, financial, and medical communities.
George S. Pepper, who managed the estate of his late father, George Pepper, was a member of and contributor to over 30 organizations in the city of Philadelphia. He was President of the American Academy of Music and the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts, and his donation secured the founding of the first Free Library of Pennsylvania.
Current Chairholder
Jeffrey Morris, PhD
Dr. Jeffrey Morris, PhD is the George S. Pepper Professor of Public Health and Preventive Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and is a Professor and Director of the Division of Biostatistics at the Perelman School of Medicine. He is an internationally recognized expert in biostatistics, bioinformatics, and cancer research. He has over 240 publications, many in the highest-impact scientific journals such as Science, Nature Medicine, JAMA, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Journal of the National Cancer Institute, Nature Immunology, Nature Biotechnology, and Science Immunology. His work is also published in the highest-ranked statistical and informatics journals such as Journal of the American Statistical Association, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series B (Statistical Methodology), Biometrics, and Bioinformatics, with more than 23,000 citations and an h-index of 76 (Google Scholar).
He has been recognized by many prestigious awards, including the Myrto Lefkopoulou Distinguished Lectureship Award at Harvard University, Fellow of the American Statistical Association and Institute of Mathematical Statistics, and the American Statistical Association Noether Early Career Scholar Award, among others. He was awarded the MD Anderson Distinguished Faculty Mentor Award in 2019. He is the editor for biology, medicine and genomics for the Annals of Applied Statistics and has served as President of the Eastern North American Region of the International Biometric Society and overall Program Chair for the Joint Statistical Meetings. His NIH– and NSF–funded research program is focused on developing new methods needed for extracting knowledge from emerging types of complex, high-dimensional data. This work is relevant to biomedical research in various scientific areas, including multi-platform genomics, proteomics, wearable devices, and biomedical and neurological imaging and has applications in cancer, ophthalmology, infection disease, addiction, and mental health. He has also worked with colleagues to help establish new standards for reproducibility in studies with complex, high-dimensional data and has led work developing new biomarker signatures and devices for precision therapy, including a clinical device for determining colorectal cancer subtypes and a blood-based biomarker index for hepatocellular carcinoma.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Morris was actively involved in scientific communication and the media. He applied his skills and perspectives as a statistical data scientist to evaluate and aggregate emerging information about the pandemic. He endeavored to communicate the resulting knowledge in an accessible way, while cutting through misinformation or other biases that may result from political, commercial, or other factors.
Dr. Morris earned his PhD in statistics from Texas A&M University in 2000. He then worked for more than 19 years at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, where he was the Del and Dennis McCarthy Distinguished Professor in Gastrointestinal Cancer Research before moving to his current position at the University of Pennsylvania.
Previous Chairholders
- Alexander C. Abbott, MD 1896–1928
- Arthur Parker Hitchens, MD 1939–1944
- John P. Hubbard, MD 1950–1963
- William L. Kissick, MD, MPH 1967–2002
- Brian L. Strom, MD, MPH 2002–2013
- Harold Feldman, MD, MSCE 2014-2022