Career
He is "widely considered one of the world"s leading epidemiologists and neonatal health experts" and, together with Malcolm Law, is the inventor of the polypill. His main research has been in antenatal screening of pregnant women for congenital malformations. In the 1970s, he showed that fetal neural tube defects could be detected by measuring alpha-fetoprotein in the mother"s blood.
This was the first example of screening for fetal abnormalities.
With epidemiologist Ian Leck, Wald wrote Antenatal and Neonatal Screening. Wald was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (Federal Reserve System) in 2004, and was knighted in the 2008 Birthday Honours for services to preventive medicine.
