2025 Distinguished Scientist Sylvia Wassertheil-Smoller, PhD

Sylvia Wassertheil-Smoller, PhD

Albert Einstein College of Medicine
Bronx, New York

Sylvia Wassertheil-Smoller, is Distinguished University Professor Emerita, Department of Epidemiology & Population Health at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and formerly, the Manealoff Foundation and Molly Rosen Chair in Social Medicine. She has had leading roles in multi-center clinical trials in hypertension control with drugs and diet that informed the national guidelines on whom to treat and when to initiate drug therapy.

She has been a principal investigator, since its inception, in the NIH-funded Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) of 161,808 postmenopausal women, which is one of the largest, longest and most comprehensive studies of older women that changed medical practice. Specifically, she and her colleagues showed that estrogen plus progestin postmenopausal therapy increased the risk of stroke and doubled the risk of dementia. Her work in brain and heart health included studies identifying depression as a cardiovascular disease risk factor and was furthered in her work in the International Stroke Genetics Network (SiGN), where she demonstrated genetic overlap of depression and subtypes of ischemic stroke.

She is the founding principal investigator, currently co-principal investigator, of the Hispanic Community Health Study/Study of Latinos, the largest study of health risk and protective factors of Hispanic men and women of diverse ethnic backgrounds in the U.S.

She has mentored many students and junior faculty through the years and has been awarded the Albert Einstein Faculty Mentoring Award, the Spirit of Achievement Award and the Presidential Medallion of Yeshiva University.

She was a founding member of the Task Force on Women’s Health in the American Heart Association and has published more than 400 scientific papers and book chapters, as well as a textbook, Biostatistics and Epidemiology: A Primer for Biomedical and Health Professionals, now in its fifth edition. Apart from her professional activities, she is the author of Chance and Consequence: A Historical Novel of Life, Love, and WWII.