One of the top men in the public health field of cancer prevention, Dr. Emerson Day '34, son of the late Edmund E. Day '05, president of Cornell, was given new and important responsibilities upon "his recent appointment as Chief of the new Preventive Medicine Division of the Sloan-Kettering Institute, research unit of the Memorial Center for Cancer and Allied Diseases in New York. He will also serve as Professor of Preventive Medicine at the Sloan-Kettering division of Cornell University Medical College at New York Hospital.
In 1947 Dr. Day became the first director of the first preventive cancer clinic maintained by the New York City Department of Health, when he was made chief of the Kips Bay-York-ville Health Center's Cancer Detection Clinic. In 1950 he was appointed director of Memorial Center's Strang Cancer Prevention Clinic, teaching also as Associate Professor of Public Health and Preventive Medicine at Cornell University Medical College.
The new division of the Sloan-Kettering Institute which Dr. Day heads will approach the problem of cancer prevention in two ways: the formulation of improved methods for the detection of early cancer and pre-cancerous conditions; and intensive study of environmental factors that may lead to cancer.
A graduate of Harvard Medical School in 1938, Dr. Day became a research fellow in cardiology at Johns Hopkins in 1940. During the war, he was flight surgeon for the Air Transport Command and later medical director of TWA, International Division.
Dr. Day, whose maternal grandfather was Charles F. Emerson '68, Dean of the College from 1893 until 1913, is married to the former Ruth Fairfield of Hanover and has three children.