The Mortimer Spiegelman Award was established following his death and maintained during their lives by donations from his sisters, Anna and Julia Spiegelman.  Continuation of the Award today, and for the foreseeable future, is supported by additional donations totaling over $40,000 that were made explicitly for this purpose by APHA Statistics Section members, previous Spiegelman Award recipients, other supporters of the APHA Statistics Section, and several institutions to which they belong.  Instrumental in enabling the 2001-2003 Spiegelman Endowment fundraising effort to reach its goal were a challenge and subsequent matching donation by Professor Gary G. Koch of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the fifth Spiegelman awardee.  A full listing of contributors, whose generosity demonstrates their personal as well as professional commitments to Biostatistics and public health, may be viewed at this page .

Mortimer Spiegelman (1901-1969)

Mortimer Spiegelman was an important contributor to Biostatistics, particularly in the areas of demography and public health.  His major contribution in the field of public health and epidemiology came toward the end of his career when he conceived of, coordinated, edited, and carried to a successful conclusion the publication of a series of monographs sponsored by the American Public Health Association (APHA) and published by the Harvard University Press.  Each monograph pertained to a specific set of diseases in which the 1960 Census was used in a standard way as the denominator for rates of disease.  In his role as editor of this series he used his considerable powers of persuasion with the authors of the monographs to ensure comparability among them and to make certain that the work on each was completed.  Sixteen monographs resulted from this effort, covering a wide range of topics as evidenced by the following titles: Accidents and Homicides; Infectious Diseases; Trends and Variations in Fertility in the U.S.; Infant, Perinatal, Maternal, and Childhood Mortality; The Epidemiology of Oral Health; Tuberculosis; Syphilis and Other Venereal Diseases; Cardiovascular Disease in the U.S.; The Frequency of Rheumatic Diseases; Digestive Disease; Mental Disorders and Suicide; Cancer in the U.S.; The Epidemiology of Neurological and Sense Organ Diseases; Mortality and Morbidity in the U.S.; Differential Mortality in the U.S.

Mr. Spiegelman was a native of Brooklyn, New York, and received a masters of engineering degree from the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn in 1923 and a masters of business administration degree from Harvard University in 1925.  He spent 40 years on the staff of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company where he published many articles and volumes that attained national and international recognition.  He coauthored with Dublin and Lotka The Money Value of Man and Length of Life, both of which have been standard reference volumes.  Although his employment was in an organization that was concerned primarily with actuarial science, his interests were much broader.  He published two editions of Introduction to Demography, which has been a standard text in demography.  The second edition, in particular, is oriented toward the general demographer and students of public health statistics rather than toward the actuary.  He did extensive work on life tables including what he referred to as “segmented generation” mortality.  This approach allows one to follow the mortality experience of a given age group over successive 10-year periods as an alternative to analyzing trends in the current mortality.  His development of the APHA monograph series further illustrates the breadth of his interests.  Mr. Spiegelman was Fellow of the Society of Actuaries, Fellow of the American Statistical Association, and Fellow of the American Public Health Association.  Each year, upon the presentation of the Mortimer Spiegelman Award, he is remembered again for his extraordinary contributions to public health statistics.

                                                                                    Earl Pollack

Adapted from Encyclopedia of Biostatistics, 2^nd edition, Vol. 7, 5115-5116. Chichester, England: John Wiley & Sons, 2005, by permission.