2003 03 21 Friday webTV Networks My quick & short autobiography for your critique! Page 2 of 4

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Roger W Rochat, M.D.

Career Overview or Research Interests: Please give a 100-150 word synopsis of your research interests, career path, or a current research project or grant you are working on. Can be in paragraph or list form. First-person is preferred.

During my third year of medical school in Seattle in 1965, I received an LSU tropical medicine fellowship to study at the Children’s Hospital in San Jose, Costa Rica. En route to San Jose I hitchhiked to New Orleans via Baltimore and Atlanta stopping at medical centers to interview for internships. While in Atlanta I was advised to visit CDC and met Lyle Conrad, Alex Langmuir and others for the first time. After two years residency with Tulane at Charity Hospital in New Orleans, I joined CDC’s EIS program and was sent to Oregon as their first EIS officer. That fall I was sent for two months to East Pakistan with Dr. Barth Reller to conduct the first field trial of oral therapy for cholera. &nbs p. Exposure to intense problems associated with rapid population growth, poverty ad crowding led me to change my career. I transferred to CDC’s Family Planning Evaluation Activity and to the Georgia Health Department. Once of my first tasks in Georgia was to determine whether the new state law legalizing abortion would reduce maternal mortality. Because of continuing discriminatory access to services, it would not. A lawyer cited this social inequity in Doe v. Bolton the Supreme Court case from Georgia that was decided concurrently with Roe v Wade. Two years later, CC supported me in studying demography at Princeton for a year. I returned to CDC spent a year in the CDC Director’s Office of Program Planning and Evaluation then returned to the Family Planning evaluation Division……. With CDC’s major reorganization in 1980-81 I became the first Director of the Division of Reproductive Health. In 1985 CDC assigned me to Emory to develop the International Health Track and in 1987 to USAID New Delhi for 2 years in charge of Population Health and Nutrition. When I returned from India, I chose to spend 6 years with CDC working in 30+ countries and with many state health departments. I retired from CDC in 1999-went with my brother briefly to Antarctica and then joined RSPH. The first two years in Epidemiology and now in International Health. My research interests have been serendipitously driven often by the interest of client health departments or the potential for funding support and diverse in subject matter and methodology. But I have had a special interest in the prevention of maternal deaths and the reduction in unintended pregnancy worldwide. I prepared the first global and regional estimates of maternal deaths for WHO in 1981. And I would nominate the elimination of maternal mortality from abortion as a priority for global attention. If women around the world had the same access to safe first trimester abortions as women in the United States then instead of having 70,000 maternal deaths from abortion in the world each year we would have 70 or fewer.