Catherine Mary Schooling

Dr. Mary Schooling joined the School of Public Health at HKU in 2002 as a part-time teaching assistant after obtaining a Ph.D. in Epidemiology from University College London (UK) following a career in IT and Operations Research starting at IBM. Dr. Schooling is also a Professor at CUNY Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy, City University of New York. She is an Associate Editor of the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health (BMJ Publishing Group) and of PLoS ONE, a Preventive Medicine Editorial board member, and an Advisory Editor for Social Science and Medicine.

Dr. Schooling’s public health research focuses on finding new interventions for major non-communicable diseases. Dr. Schooling is using well-established theory from evolutionary biology, i.e., that growth and reproduction trade-off against longevity, to explain population health, optimize early life interventions, and identify new interventions. Dr. Schooling is also exploiting unique attributes of Southern China to determine the role of key modifiable exposures, such as alcohol use, diet, obesity, physical activity, breastfeeding, and traditional Chinese medicines, in non-communicable diseases. Finally, Dr. Schooling is exploiting discrepancies between East and West to identify novel drivers of population health. Key resources for this program are cohort studies, i.e., "Children of 1997", the Elderly Health Service Cohort, and the Guangzhou Biobank Cohort Study, and innovative methods, such as Mendelian randomization.