March 17th 2006

OBITUARY: Ruth Lilis, MD

Dear Colleagues and Fellows of the Collegium Ramazzini,

It is with profound sadness that I announce the passing on March 17, 2006 of Ruth Lilis, MD, Fellow of the Collegium Ramazzini and Professor Emerita in the Department of Community & Preventive Medicine of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine.

Dr Lilis had been a member of our faculty of Mount Sinai since the early 1970s. She was a renowned occupational physician who received her early training in her native Romania. She was the founder of the clinical center in occupational medicine at Mount Sinai, which is the predecessor of our Selikoff Center for Occupational and Environmental Medicine and of our World Trade Center Medical programs. Without Ruth's pioneering vision, those great programs would never have come to be. She was a skilled teacher and researcher, who trained a generation of physicians in occupational medicine and the pursuit of truth, myself among them, and who remembered always her responsibility to protect the health of working men and women. She was a true follower of Bernardino Ramazzini.

Please join me in expressing our heartfelt sympathies and sorrow to her family and friends.

Philip J. Landrigan, MD, MSc