Benjamin Ferris (physician)

Benjamin Greeley Ferris Jr. (24 January 1919 – 1 August 1996) was an American physician and epidemiologist, a professor at Harvard School of Public Health who helped to pioneer statistical studies into the health effects of air pollution in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s.

In the early 1960s, Ferris and colleague Donald O. Anderson carried out the first large-scale statistical study in the United States linking cigarette smoking to respiratory disease. In 1973, Ferris and Frank E. Speizer launched a statistical study comparing air pollution in six urban areas of the United States. This became the Harvard Six Cities study, a landmark piece of public health research that helped to prove the link between fine-particulate air pollution and higher death rates when it was published in 1993.