Prof. Oscar H. Franco is a Professor of Epidemiology and Public Health and Director of the Institute of Social and Preventive Medicine (ISPM) at the University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland. Furthermore, Oscar is an Adjunct Professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and scientific advisor for the French television channel France24. Prof. Franco has published over 700 publications and has an H-index of 94.

Prof. Franco obtained his MD at Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Bogotá, Colombia in 1998. In 2001, he moved to the Netherlands to complete MSc and DSc degrees in clinical epidemiology and a PhD in public health and cardiovascular disease prevention (2005) at the Erasmus University Medical Center. Following a postdoc at Erasmus MC, he moved to the UK where he was a senior public health epidemiologist at Unilever England, assistant professor of public health at the University of Warwick, and then director of the MPhil program and clinical lecturer in public health at the University of Cambridge. In 2012, Prof. Franco returned to ErasmusMC where he worked as a professor of preventive medicine and the principal investigator of the cardiovascular epidemiology group. He also founded and directed the Rotterdam Intergenerational Ageing Research Center, Erasmus AGE, and he was co-founder and CEO of Erasmus Epidemiology Resources.

As a fellow of, inter alia, the European Society of Cardiology and St Edmunds’ College at the University of Cambridge, Prof. Franco was awarded the Dutch national public health prize of 2005.