Anne Hersey Coulson, PhD

Born:

Anne Coulson was a pioneer in CVD epidemiology as a member of the UCLA team that studied Los Angeles civil service populations and their risk of CVD from the early 1950s. As the UCLA groups’ senior statistician, she was central to the design and analysis of their early cohort studies and their participation in the AHA Pooling Project of U.S. cohorts completed in the 1970s.

Coulson graduated from Barnard College and from Columbia University in Psychology. She became Statistician at UCLA in 1956 and Principal Statistician in 1976, and subsequently directed the Health Information Library in the Department of Epidemiology, teaching Principles of Epidemiology and Advanced Epidemiology. Her career, in the group including John Chapman, Leo Reeder, Roger Detels, and FJ. Massey, was concerned with CVD risk, followed by study of drug use and the risk of respiratory diseases, and with contraception and reproductive questions.

She was active in the governance of the AHA Council on Epidemiology and Prevention from its earliest days in the 1960s. (HB)