Young Kyung Do, Winner of the 2020 Rothman Epidemiology Prize

The Editors and Editorial Board of Epidemiology are pleased to announce the selection of Young Kyung Do as the winner of this year’s Rothman Epidemiology Prize. This award of $5000 is funded from a private endowment and is given annually for the best paper published in the journal in the preceding year. The selection criteria are importance, originality, clarity of thought, and excellence in writing. Dr. Do’s winning paper, titled “Causal Effect of Sleep Duration on Body Weight in Adolescents: A Population-based Study Using a Natural Experiment,” appeared in our November 2019 issue. The paper exploited a natural experiment in South Korea, where in March 2011, authorities in three of the 16 administrative regions required private tutoring institutes to close at 10 PM. The policy change was associated with sleep extension and body weight reduction in high school students. The study provides new population-level, causal evidence that corroborates consistent findings in the epidemiologic literature on the link between short sleep duration and increased body weight. Dr. Do is a Professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management, and Director of the Institute of Health Policy and Management, at the Seoul National University College of Medicine.

Congratulations also to runners-up Raiden B. Hasegawa and colleagues for their paper titled “Evaluating Missouri’s Handgun Purchaser Law: A Bracketing Method for Addressing Concerns about History Interacting with Group” (May, 2019) and Ghassan B. Hamra and colleagues for their paper titled “Prenatal Exposure to Endocrine-disrupting Chemicals in Relation to Autism Spectrum Disorder and Intellectual Disability” (May, 2019).