Wade Hampton Frost

An American epidemiologist often described as the father of modern American epidemiology. Frost became the first resident lecturer in epidemiology at the newly founded Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health, later serving as chair of its Department of Epidemiology from 1919 to 1938 and as the school's dean from 1931 to 1934, where he trained a generation of epidemiologists and helped establish epidemiology as an academic discipline built on quantitative analysis of disease in populations. His own research addressed poliomyelitis, influenza, diphtheria and tuberculosis, and he took part in one of the first successful efforts to contain a yellow fever epidemic within the United States, in 1906, as well as typhoid outbreak investigations that applied emerging laboratory methods to fieldwork. He published 57 scientific papers over his career before his death from esophageal cancer in 1938.