Biography

For 30 years, Dr. Pál Weihe has led the Department of Occupational Medicine and Public Health in the Faroe Islands and, for part of this period, as Medical Director of the Faroese Hospital System. He also is an Adjunct Professor at the University of the Faroe Islands, a Visiting Scientist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and a Visiting Scientist at the Institute of Public Health at the University of Southern Denmark. Between 2005 and 2016, Dr. Weihe served as Chair of the Faroese Board of Public Health, and, in 2013, he was awarded the Science Communication Award by the Faroese Research Council.

Dr. Weihe is deeply committed to serving his community through the provision of medical care and devotion to his work on minimizing community exposures to marine contaminants. Specifically, he has overseen the examinations of over 3,000 Faroe Islanders of five prospective studies of birth cohorts exposed to marine contaminants associated with neurotoxicity, growth and development, immunotoxicity, and endocrine disruption. He is also involved in other research areas such as reproductive toxicological studies of time to pregnancy and semen quality as well as age-related functional deficits and degenerative diseases, such as Parkinson’s disease and cardiovascular diseases, concerning lifetime exposure to methylmercury and persistent lipophilic contaminants.

Dr. Weihe is clinical lead for Project 2 of the STEEP project, which involves nearly 500 children age 8 and carried out in his community of the Faroe Islands.