Springfield College Hosts 2017 Peter V. Karpovich Lecture
At left, Springfield College Dean for the School of Health, Physical Education, and Recreation Tracey Matthews and physical activity and health expert I-Min Lee.
The Springfield College School of Health, Physical Education, and Recreation presented the Peter V. Karpovich Lecture featuring physical activity and health expert I-Min Lee, on Wednesday, Oct. 25, 2017, in the Cleveland E. and Phyllis B. Dodge Room inside the Flynn Campus Union.
Lee is a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and professor of epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Her primary areas of interest are the role of physical activity in preventing chronic diseases and enhancing longevity, and women’s health. She has served on national and international expert panels developing physical activity guidelines, including the 2008 Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans, the 2010 World Health Organization Global Recommendations on Physical Activity for Health, and the 2013 American College of Cardiology/American Heart Association guideline on Lifestyle Management to Reduce Cardiovascular Risk.
Lee has contributed to more than 390 scientific publications. She is the lead editor of Epidemiologic Methods in Physical Activity Studies, which has also been translated into the Korean language, and is a co-editor of the second edition of Physical Activity Epidemiology.
She is principal investigator of the Harvard Alumni Health Study, a long-standing prospective cohort study of 33,000 Harvard alumni, begun by Professor Ralph Paffenbarger in the 1960s, that focuses on the relationship between physical activity and health outcomes. Lee is one of the principal investigators of the Women’s Health Study (WHS), a completed randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial testing low-dose aspirin and vitamin E for preventing cardiovascular disease and cancer among 40,000 women who are now followed observationally. She is principal investigator of a study that measured seven days of physical activity with accelerometers in 18,000 women from the WHS.
Springfield College established the Karpovich Lecture in 1973 in memory of its former faculty member, Peter V. Karpovich, who was an internationally recognized exercise physiologist and one of the principal founders of the American College of Sports Medicine. Karpovich joined the Springfield College faculty in 1927 serving as a professor of physiology. He was named director of health education at the College in 1947 and was appointed research professor of physiology in 1955.
