Simon Chapman (academic)
Simon Fenton Chapman, AO (born 14 December 1951) is an Australian academic and tobacco control activist. Life and career. Chapman was born in Bowral, New South Wales to Margaret and Alec Chapman who had emigrated from England in 1948. He is an Emeritus Professor in Public Health at the University of Sydney. In his PhD in social medicine he examined the semiotics of cigarette advertising. He has authored 21 books and major reports, 338 papers and editorials, and 198 letters and commentaries in peer reviewed journals. Chapman is a regular writer on public health matters in leading  Australian newspapers and blogs, having written some 470 opinion page and journalistic articles since 1981. His main research interests are in tobacco control, media discourses on health and illness, and risk communication. He taught annual courses in Public Health Advocacy and Tobacco Control in the University of Sydney's MPH program. He wrote a regular column, Smoke Signals, on public health matters for The Conversation from January 2015-August 2017 which by February 2022 had been read 3.558 million times. He blogs at simonchapman6.com In 1997 Chapman won the World Health Organization's World No Tobacco Day Medal; in 1999 , the National Heart Foundation of Australia's gold medal; in 2006 the Thoracic Society of Australia & New Zealand President's Award. In 2003 he was voted by his international peers to be awarded the American Cancer Society's Luther L. Terry Award for outstanding individual leadership in tobacco control. In 2005, his research on the tobacco industry was selected by the National Health and Medical Research Council as being one of its "top 10" projects. He was foundational deputy editor of the "British Medical Journal"'s specialist journal, "Tobacco Control" from 1992 to 1998, and its editor from 1999 to  2008. He was Tobacco Control's commissioning editor for Low and Middle Income Countries from 2008 to 2010 and is now editor emeritus. Chapman studied health complaints regarding wind farms in Australia in 2012 and concluded the complaints were likely to be the result of nocebo effects. In 2008 he was awarded the $50,000 NSW Premier's award for Cancer Researcher of the Year, voted to become a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia, won the Public Health Association of Australia's Sidney Sax medal, and was included in the "Sydney Morning Herald"'s "Sydney Magazine