Biography

Dr. Athas received a PhD in Epidemiology in 1988 from the Johns Hopkins University School of Hygiene and Public Health. His dissertation research involved developing a population-based blood test to measure individual capacity to repair DNA damage, for which he received a US Patent. Following a postdoctoral training fellowship at Hopkins, he joined the New Mexico Department of Health in 1991, where he led several epidemiologic studies of cancer incidence among populations living in proximity to the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Working closely with the UNM New Mexico Tumor Registry, these studies were among the first to document the increasing temporal trend in thyroid cancer subsequently seen in the US and globally. In 1996, Dr. Athas joined UNM and spent the remainder of his professional career conducting applied research on population-based health surveillance. He was among the first health researchers in New Mexico to apply geographic information systems (GIS) to health surveillance and worked for many years in collaboration with the state health department to enhance their health surveillance capacity with GIS-based methods. Retired in 2018, Dr. Athas has returned to part-time service as a course instructor at the undergraduate and graduate level.

Courses Taught

  • Cancer Epidemiology
  • Environmental and Occupational Health
  • GIS Methods for Public Health