Arthur Gould Schatzkin (February 11, 1948 in New York City – January 20, 2011 in Chevy Chase, Maryland) was an American nutritional epidemiologist who spent much of his career at the National Cancer Institute.

Schatzkin earned a bachelor's degree from Yale University in 1969.^[1] As an undergraduate, Schatzkin was active in Students for a Democratic Society, and after graduation from Yale he went to work for the university as a grounds maintenance worker. He remained an active leftist, including taking part in an occupation on behalf on another worker and speaking at a rally of striking Winchester workers, and in 1969 he was fired, arrested, and tried for his activism.^[2]

He earned an M.D. from the SUNY Downstate College of Medicine in 1976, and an M.P.H. and doctorate in public health from Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health.^[3][4] He completed residency training at Montefiore Medical Center (1979, internal medicine) and Mount Sinai Hospital (Manhattan) (1981, preventive medicine).^[1]

One of Schatzkin's first academic positions in his career was as an assistant professor of public health and medicine at Boston University.^[5] In 1984, he began working at the National Cancer Institute, where he became the chair of the Nutritional Epidemiology Branch in 1999.^[5]

Schatzkin's early research focused on the link between alcohol consumption and breast cancer.^[5] Later, during the 1990s, he led the Polyp Prevention Trial, which found that, contrary to conventional wisdom, fiber intake was not associated with the development of precancerous polyps.^[5] He was also the principal investigator for the NIH-AARP Diet and Health Study, which enrolled over 500,000 people and is one of the largest-ever diet and lifestyle studies.^[6] The study began in the mid-1990s and was still ongoing at the time of his death in 2011.^[5]

Schatzkin died on January 20, 2011, at his home in Chevy Chase, Maryland, at the age of 62. He had previously been suffering from brain cancer.^[4]