Roger Henry Secker-Walker

Roger Henry Secker-Walker gained a first class natural sciences degree at Clare College, Cambridge, which was followed by clinical training at University College Hospital, London. He became MRCP in 1963, taking up a lectureship in University College Hospital Medical School. Here he was one of the pioneers of radioisotope scanning of the lungs and kidney, which led, in 1971, to a senior research fellowship and later acting directorship of the Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology at Washington University, St Louis, Missouri, United States. He subsequently became the first head of the Pulmonary Division at St Louis University. He established a very successful fellowship programme there and won two teachers of the year awards.

In 1981 he was asked to become director of the Vermont Lung Center at the University of Vermont in Burlington and in 1983 became director of the Office of Health Promotion Research, a multidisciplinary team that did groundbreaking work in smoking prevention and cessation. He demonstrated that targeting anti-smoking propaganda to some isolated communities and not to others reduced the smoking rates among those young people targeted. Throughout his career in the United States he was retained as a consultant or attending chest physician

After retirement he and his wife travelled extensively, and he was able to tend his much-loved garden in Burlington, Vermont. He leaves a wife, Jocelyn; two children; and a granddaughter.