James Stephen Koopman, M.D., M.P.H., professor emeritus of epidemiology in the University of Michigan’s School of Public Health, died in his Fort Myers home December 7, just months after his eighty-first birthday, surrounded and supported by his family. Throughout his long and productive career, Professor Koopman (who preferred to be known as “Jim”) made major contributions to our understanding of infectious disease processes by combining data analysis with dynamical transmission theory.
When Jim enrolled as an undergraduate at the University of Michigan in 1961 his interests were in science, math, and writing poetry and short stories. With the help of roommates from a variety of countries, Jim became an eager internationalist, teaching himself to speak Spanish without an accent by listening to recordings of romantic Latin American poetry. In 1963 he entered medical school under a new program that provided him the opportunity to pursue his diverse interests. After spending his senior year in Vicuña, Chile, where he found himself on staff at the local hospital, Jim received both his BS and his MD at the U of M in 1969. In the following 17 years, he was the acting state epidemiologist in the State of Washington; he worked on the eradication of smallpox in Uttar Pradesh, India; and he investigated the connections between malnutrition and diarrheal disease in Cali, Colombia. These field experiences led him to pursue a Masters of Public Health at the University of Washington (awarded in 1976) and to his recognition that theory interacting with data should be the cornerstone of public health decision making. It was also the source of his drive to move the field of epidemiology toward a more systems-based science.
In 1978 he returned to the University of Michigan to accept a faculty position as assistant professor at the School of Public Health. Further field work in the 1980s included an analysis of 9,000 rotavirus sera pairs from Professor Arnold Monto’s study in Tecumseh, Michigan – an analysis that still provides the best estimates of rotavirus infection transmission dynamics – and a two-year project in 70 villages in southern Mexico that helped control a dengue outbreak. In Jim’s own words: “Upon returning from Mexico in 1986 I dedicated myself to ‘developing theory that serves public health.’ I did that because I saw that the theoretical foundations for public health actions needed a firmer footing in infection transmission system theory, models, and data. Infection control actions were too often being undertaken with only a vague understanding of system effects on transmission dynamics.”
In the late 1980s, Jim took this systems approach to understand more clearly the transmission dynamics of HIV. Along with colleagues John Jacquez, Ira Longini, and Carl Simon, he proposed that transmission of HIV was highest during the early phases of infection. Their paper won the Howard Temin award for best AIDS epidemiology paper of the year in The Journal of AIDS. In a further series of influential manuscripts, Jim and his colleagues pursued this idea and its implications at the population level by developing models that described transmission through a network of contact patterns defined by individual-level behavioral practices. In 2005, their work on the importance of contact structure on transmission dynamics won the Kenneth Rothman Prize for the best paper in the journal Epidemiology.
Following his initial observations with HIV that acute infection played a crucial role in the transmission system, Jim continued to clarify how much transmission occurs in different stages of infection, using virus genetic sequences from populations of infected individuals in research with colleagues Edward Ionides and Eric Volz. This work provided a cornerstone for advancing transmission system analyses of environmentally mediated transmission systems. Work with colleague Joe Eisenberg developed a new area in transmission systems that took advantage of environmental data from pathogens, such as influenza, norovirus, Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus (MRSA), and polio, where the environment plays a central role in transmission, and thereby in its prevention.
Beyond being a leader in developing the science of transmission systems, Jim was one of only a few researchers committed to developing transmission models using a well-informed public health and epidemiology framework. His work continues to inspire epidemiologists grappling with how to integrate a systems perspective into the field. It is largely because of Jim’s dedicated body of work and his accomplishments over the years that the field is embracing a more systems-based perspective.
If anything matched Jim’s devotion to public health it was his love for his extended family. Married three times, Jim developed – and maintained – wide circles of family connection in Washington, Oregon, California, Maine, Ohio, Ann Arbor, Southwest Florida and the Odawa community in Northern Michigan. He never missed an opportunity to say how proud he was of his children, and he continued to inspire his grandchildren with his passion for science up until a few days before his death. Jim was an ardent outdoorsman; he loved to cross-country ski over frozen lakes, kayak the big waves, get lost in the woods, and tend his groves of young cedar trees. As a Quaker, Jim’s romantic, wide-ranging spirituality was much appreciated by the Fort Myers Friends Meeting.
Raised to doubt anything that couldn’t be proved, Jim nevertheless planned to explore the multi-verse in some other-worldly form after his death. We sense his presence in that realm where time, form, space, and distance have no meaning.
