To many of his colleagues and students at UC Berkeley School of Public Health, Dr. John M. “Jack” Colford Jr. was the one person they could call in a pinch.
It’s not that he had a lot of free time. Colford, a physician and professor of epidemiology, was busy serving as a principal investigator for studies of the relationship between water quality indicators and human health, funded by the National Institutes of Health, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the state of California. He also oversaw numerous field trials and observational studies on the impact of water, sanitation and hygiene interventions around the world—landmark research known as the WASH interventions. But he somehow found time to offer a hand.
At Colford’s recent retirement celebration, after 29 years on the UC Berkeley School of Public Health faculty, Colford’s colleagues and former students praised him for his generous spirit as well as his considerable academic achievements.
“Jack has been an absolute treasure as a colleague for the past 33 years,” said Dr. Arthur Reingold, a professor of epidemiology, and one of Colford’s professors-turned-collaborators.
“I can’t remember a single time, when asked to do anything on behalf of the department or the school or the students or anyone; when Jack was not a gentleman and said, ‘Yes.’ Jack never once disappointed me in the past 33 years.”
Colford’s scientific integrity, along with inclusiveness and support for his students, is something that many of those gathered said they hope to emulate.
Benjamin Arnold, PhD, who studied under Colford and is now an associate professor at UCSF’s Proctor Foundation, said there could be no better role model.
“He comes to every relationship with generosity, compassion and kindness,” said Arnold, who received his master’s and doctoral degrees from UC Berkeley School of Public Health. Colford, Arnold said, has always helped his team whether advocating for better salaries, talking with worried students at odd hours, or strategizing during career emergencies.
By acknowledging his own research errors, rather than covering them up, Arnold added, Colford has been a great role model for his students.
“We all make mistakes and Jack is truly the first to forgive. It helps everybody around him feel safe and also admit mistakes.”
Jade Benjamin-Chung, an assistant professor at Stanford University in the department of Epidemiology and Population Health, studied with Colford while working toward her master’s and doctoral degrees at UC Berkeley. She also taught with Colford for the school’s Online Master of Public Health program, which he directed from 2017 to 2022.
“You modeled a firm commitment to scientific rigor and also inclusiveness and generosity,” Benjamin-Chung said. “Your ‘Jackisms’ now pepper my own mentoring conversations.”
Jack Colford with some of his students.
Colford was born in 1960 into an Air Force family then living in Spokane, WA. The Colfords moved from Washington to the Dakotas, then to Germany and New Mexico, before settling in Mountain View, California.
After high school, Colford majored in chemistry at Santa Clara University. He left early for medical school at Johns Hopkins University. After graduating from Hopkins in 1985, Colford began his medical residency at UCSF and was then was recruited to serve as Chief Resident at Stanford, Eventually, he returned to UCSF, where he was a National Institutes of Health HIV fellow at the Center for AIDS Prevention Studies while concurrently completing an infectious diseases fellowship.
While working on HIV research, Colford became intrigued by epidemiology. He enrolled in the master’s program at UC Berkeley, then went on to earn his doctorate in epidemiology in 1995. He was appointed professor of epidemiology in 1996.
“I was inspired by one of my mentors, Ira Tager,” Colford said in a May interview. I really enjoyed the subject matter of epidemiology because it took such a broad population view of health.”
Since then, Colford has taught courses each year on Epidemiologic Methods, the Design of Randomized Controlled Trials, and on Impact Evaluation for Health Professionals.
His research has been prolific. His series of WASH studies, in the United States, Kenya, Bangladesh, Bolivia and other countries, were funded by the National Institutes of Health, the Gates Foundation, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The largest ones were the WASH Benefits trials, which examined the benefits of water quality, sanitation, hand washing, and nutrition interventions in Kenya and Bangladesh.
The studies used six different treatment groups and compared them against a control group of subjects, to see what interventions, if any, were effective in reducing diarrhea and improving child growth.
The nutrition therapies worked really well in both countries, but some of the other interventions were surprisingly unsuccessful.
“It seems counterintuitive,” he said. “But showing that an intervention didn’t work was also an important outcome, because then people could move on and try something different.”
Colford and his lab also conducted beach water research—testing beaches for indicators of contamination, and following up with people who had been in the water or on the beach. Another major project involved helping Bolivians develop solar energy for water treatment.
He is proud of his team’s focus on transparency and replicability.
“That’s an important issue I find in trials,” he said. “That other people can replicate the analyses and that it’s very transparent what the data were. We made a point to share our data publicly after anonymizing it. It’s been an evolution in the field. More and more people do that now and we were part of that trend.”
Despite so many former students praising his teaching, Colford is modest about his contribution as a mentor. He acknowledges that constantly engaging with students during class, as he does, rather than lecturing, is helpful; as is being available in and outside of class.
But Colford gives much of the credit to his students.
“I was lucky to have such phenomenal students that we have at Berkeley—that is what made a big difference. It makes life easy, it’s nice.”