Albert Lowenfels, a graduate of New York University College of Medicine has been a faculty member of New York Medical College for several decades. Initially trained as a surgeon, he has pursued a second career in epidemiology with a focus on the relationship between benign and malignant disease.. His special areas of interest as represented in more than 250 peer-reviewed publications include: alcohol-related illnesses, acute and chronic pancreatitis, epidemiology of pancreatic cancer, and cystic fibrosis. He is currently Emeritus Professor of Surgery, and also Professor of Community and Preventive Medicine at New York Medical College. He is Senior Advisor in the Department Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the European Institute of Oncology in Milan, Consultant in the Department of Global Health at Weill-Cornell Medical College in Qatar, and was an External Advisor for a NIH-funded program to detect gene(s) for familial pancreatic cancer (PACGENE). He is a member of the American Gastrointestinal Association, the American Pancreatic Association, and of the Panc4 Consortium, an international group of investigators associated with case-control studies of pancreatic cancer who have agreed to pool their data for cooperative studies. He also holds the post of Director of the surgical website, Medscape.