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CUNY SPH is proud to announce that, effective July 1, 2025, Dr. Mary Schooling has been elevated to the rank of distinguished professor.
CUNY confers the title of distinguished professor on faculty who have built international reputations as leaders within their fields and have been consistent producers of innovative and influential research. Dr. Schooling is a leading scholar in her field of environmental, occupational, and geospatial health sciences. Her groundbreaking work, crossing traditional boundaries of individual disciplines or fields of enquiry, focuses on finding new interventions for major non-communicable diseases, and has yielded significant translatable mechanistic insights.
These insights include identifying factors that contribute to higher rates of ischemic cardiovascular disease and hence to shorter lives in men than women, such as polyunsaturated fatty acids, constituents of meat (L-carnitine), body mass index, dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA) sulfate and testosterone. Notably, one of these insights prompted the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and Health Canada to warn in 2014 about the risks of testosterone therapy. These achievements have been underpinned by methodological innovation, emphasis on working within an explanatory paradigm informed by evolutionary biology and a focus on the use of quasi experimental designs to make causal inferences. Currently, Dr Schooling is applying her skills to clarify the mechanism and effects of the new weight loss drugs.
Dr. Schooling is an associate editor at both the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health (BMJ Publishing Group) and the International Journal of Epidemiology (Oxford Academic). She is also an editorial board member of Preventive Medicine (Elsevier). She is chair of the Curriculum Committee at CUNY SPH, with a keen interest in ensuring the very latest thinking is taught to students.
Dr. Schooling joined CUNY in 2010, shortly after starting an academic faculty career as an assistant professor at the University of Hong Kong in 2008, and has been a professor at CUNY SPH since 2013. She was awarded her PhD in epidemiology at University College London. She has a master’s degree in statistics from Birkbeck College London and in operations research from Strathclyde University. She completed her prize-winning undergraduate studies in pure math and medieval history at St. Andrews University.
“We are thrilled the university has bestowed this special honor on Dr. Schooling and we thank the CUNY Board of Trustees for supporting the school’s nomination,” says CUNY SPH Dean Ayman El-Mohandes. “We are thrilled that her singular contributions to the field of public health are being recognized in this way and we look forward to continuing to support her work in this new chapter of her career.”
Dr. Schooling joins an eminent group of distinguished professors at CUNY SPH including Professors Luisa N. Borrell, Nicholas Freudenberg, Renee Goodwin, Christian Grov, Terry Huang, and Denis Nash.
