Leonard Syme is Professor of Epidemiology (Emeritus) at the School of Public Health at the University of California at Berkeley. He received a PhD in Medical Sociology from Yale University in 1957. During the first half of his career he did "normal" research in social epidemiology: studies of socio-cultural factors as they influenced disease occurrence. He studied coronary heart disease in Japanese migrants to Hawaii and California, hypertension among African Americans in California, the health consequences of social isolation in Alameda County, California, coronary heart disease and hypertension among San Francisco bus drivers, and the relationship between social class and disease among British civil servants. During the second half of his career, he has devoted himself to developing intervention programs to prevent disease. These efforts have relied on research findings from social epidemiology and have focused on community programs rather than efforts directed primarily to individuals.