He had a long career as a research scientist in
biostatistics and
public health administration at Hopkins, where he was previously dean and director of the
School of Public Health and later was vice president in charge of medical activities. He was an Invited Speaker at the
ICM in 1924 in
Toronto. In 1927 he was elected as a
Fellow of the American Statistical Association. As a researcher, he developed a well known statistical technique for estimating the
ED-50, and his work with epidemiologist
Wade Hampton Frost on the
Reed–Frost epidemic models also remains well known. He died in Berlin, New Hampshire, in 1966. Lowell Reed attended the
University of Maine, graduating in 1907 with a degree in electrical engineering. In 1915 he earned a PhD in mathematics at the
University of Pennsylvania. This unusual combination of disciplines was put to use when he arrived at
Johns Hopkins University in 1918, where he organized the Department of Biometry and Vital Statistics at the School of Hygiene and Public Health (now the
Bloomberg School of Public Health) and was credited with coining the term "
biostatistics". He became chair of that department in 1925 and, in 1947, was named vice president in charge of medical activities. Reed retired from the Hopkins faculty in June 1953, only to be recalled later that summer to serve as president when
Detlev Bronk departed for
Rockefeller University. In September 1953, he returned to Baltimore from his home in
New Hampshire to accept the presidency, stating, "For 30-odd years, I have had a glorious time at the Hopkins. I owed it to the people there to return." Although he made it clear that he did not plan to serve indefinitely, he did not regard himself as a caretaker or interim president. He oversaw the end of the
Owen Lattimore espionage indictments (all charges were dropped in 1955), and new construction on the various Hopkins campuses, while still keeping a hand in
biostatistics. Reed retired for the second and final time in 1956, succeeded as president by
Milton S. Eisenhower. Returning to his beloved New Hampshire farm, he again took up his hobbies of woodworking, painting, hiking and camping, and enjoyed an active retirement until his death in 1966. Reed Hall, a residence hall for medical school students and house staff on the Johns Hopkins medical campus, was named in his honor in 1962. ==Selected publications==