Prof. Dr. Annette Peters
Director of the Institute of Epidemiology“We live in a changing world. Ageing societies and climate change affect our health now and tomorrow. The pandemic shows how important epidemiology is. My vision is to understand and mitigate the burden of disease based on cohort studies.”
“We live in a changing world. Ageing societies and climate change affect our health now and tomorrow. The pandemic shows how important epidemiology is. My vision is to understand and mitigate the burden of disease based on cohort studies.”
Academic Career and Research Areas
Annette Peters pioneered work identifying the link between ambient particulate matter and cardiovascular disease. With large-scale prospective population-based cohort studies she and her team investigate how genetic, environmental and behavioral risk factors jointly shape health and disease.
Her training in epidemiology, biology and mathematics allows an interdisciplinary approach spanning from environmental health to molecular epidemiology.
Early in her career, she has as principal investigator conducted several panel studies and a case-crossover study assessing the role of environmental exposures on respiratory and cardiovascular disease. A lifelong interest is the role of ultrafine particles and she spearheads a research program on environmental measurements for air pollution and other environmental exposures since two decades.
Annette Peters is also responsible for the follow-up of the longitudinal cohort study KORA (Cooperative Health Research in the Augsburg Region). KORA follows with regular re-examinations 18,000 individuals recruited in the age of 25 to 74 years in 1984 to 2001 in Augsburg region. They have enlarged their research portfolio to age-related diseases as part of the KORA-Age project.
Today, Annette Peters has a national leading role within the German National Cohort NAKO, which investigates prospectively 205,000 men and women. NAKO is a nation-wide beyond the state of the art large-scale epidemiological study including innovative biobanking for all members and magnet resonance tomography assessments for 30,000 participants. Until 2022, she chaired the board of directors. Even more, she is a principal investigator responsible for the NAKO study center in Augsburg and the central biorepository at Helmholtz Munich. Finally yet importantly, she started additional data collection in order to contribute to understanding the health impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Fields of Work and Expertise
Environmental Epidemiology Molecular Epidemiology Cohort Studies Cardiovascular Diseases Metabolic Diseases Healthy Ageing Magnet Resonance Imaging Biomarkers Statistical Methods
Professional Background
Member of WHO Scientific Advisory Group on “Air Pollution & Health”
Chair of the Board of Directors, German National Cohort, NAKO e.V.
Director of the Institute of Epidemiology, Helmholtz Munich
Full Professor, Chair of Epidemiology at the Institute for Medical Data Processing, Biometrics and Epidemiology, Ludwig-Maximilians University Munich
Adjunct Associate Professor, Department of Environmental Health, Harvard School of Public Health, Boston
Awards and Recognitions
John Goldsmith Award
For achievements in the field of environmental epidemiology, International Society for Environmental Epidemiology
2019President of the International Society for Environmental Epidemiology
2012 - 2013Johann-Peter-Süßmilch medal
GMDS – Society for Medical Statistics, Biometrics and Epidemiology, Germany
2005David V. Bates Award
First awardee of the Young Investigator Award, American Thoracic Society, USA
2000
Highlight Publications
See all1997 American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine
Respiratory effects are associated with the number of ultrafine particles.
2014 BMJ
2016 Aging (Albany NY)
DNA methylation-based measures of biological age: meta-analysis predicting time to death.
2017 Nature
Epigenome-wide association study of body mass index, and the adverse outcomes of adiposity.
2017 Diabetes
2021 Lancet Planet Health
Networks and Affiliations
