Stephan Weiland

Stephan Karl Maria Weiland (born December 25, 1958 in Münster , † March 19, 2007 in Ulm ) was a German epidemiologist and university professor.

Career

Weiland began studying physics at Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich in 1977 before moving to Cologne in 1978. At the University of Cologne he changed his subject and studied medicine . In autumn 1985 he was licensed as a doctor. Parallel to his assistantship, he was doing his doctorate on the importance of the C-reactive protein for the diagnosis of inflammatory diseases of the central nervous system in infants and children.

After completing his doctorate, Weiland left Germany and worked for two years in Canada as a scholarship holder of the German Academic Exchange Service at McGill University in Montréal . There he graduated with an MSc . He then returned to his home country in 1990 and was a member of the staff of the Ruhr-Universität Bochum as a research assistant , where he developed into an expert on chronic diseases and their effects on mental health in children.

Weiland went to the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität in Münster in 1993 , where he completed his habilitation in 1996 with his thesis "The health and cancer risk of employees in the German rubber industry: results of a cohort study on the mortality of 15,499 male employees in the years 1981-1991". In the spring of 1995 he was appointed Adjunct Assistant Professor at the University of Massachusetts by the Department of Biostatistics and Epidemiology , and two years later he was appointed Adjunct Associate Professor . In 1999 he finally took on his first teaching position in Germany and headed the environmental epidemiology working group. On January 1, 2002, he accepted an offer from Ulm University to inherit the outgoing Professor Hermann Brenner and to take over the management of the Epidemiology Department.

In the spring of 2007, Weiland died unexpectedly while the passionate athlete was preparing for a triathlon . In memory of him, the German Society for Epidemiology awarded the Stephan Weiland Prize named after him, which is awarded to publications by young epidemiologists .

Research and Teaching

Weiland distinguished himself above all through his numerous studies and expert reports. a. for international institutions. The focus of his work as an epidemiologist was the investigation of the spread of asthma and allergies, especially among children, for which he took part in a wide-ranging international cohort study called the International Study of Asthma and Allergies in Childhood (ISAAC) and was the coordinator for Western Europe. The European Union also consulted him as an expert on “Environment and Health”.

During his time in Ulm, he expanded his field of study to include studies on life expectancy . To this end, he cooperated with the actuarial research team at the local university around Hans-Joachim Zwiesler .

Web links

• Obituary in the scientific magazine Epidemiology