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McBride named chair of behavioral sciences and health education |
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Humanitarian awards Each year, Emory's Division of Campus Life and the Office of Student Leadership recognizes students for outstanding humanitarian work, and this year, Rollins students received four of the seven awards. The recipients are Samantha Lie-Tjauw 14MPH, Annum Shaikh 14MPH, Alek Shybut 14MPH, and Ayanna Williams 14MPH. Public Health in Action honorees Three adjunct faculty members were honored for teaching excellence during Public Health in Action, the annual year-end celebration sponsored by the Office of Career Services to recognize community partners in education. Honorees included Mark Anderson (global health), Flemming Konradsen (environmental health), and Rob Merritt (health policy and management). The program also featured poster presentations by 12 student finalists who demonstrated public health in action through their practicum experiences. Milenka Jean-Baptiste (behavioral sciences and health education), Kayoko Shioda (environmental health), and Qingyang Xiao (environmental health) received top honors for their poster presentations. New center for humanitarian emergencies Rollins has established a new Center for Complex Humanitarian Emergencies to encourage collaborations between the school and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Dabney Evans, assistant professor of global health, is leading the school's effort. RSPH faculty alums honored at GPHA meeting At the March meeting of the Georgia Public Health Association, Melissa Alperin 91MPH (behavioral sciences and health education) received the Kathy Miner Health Education & Promotion Award, and Paula Frew 01MPH (adjunct) received the Al Dohany Award for Community Service.
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This year's department teaching awards go to Colin Talley (behavioral sciences and health education), Howard Chang (biostatistics), John McGowan (executive MPH), Matthew Strickland (environmental health), Michael Kramer (epidemiology), Juan Leon (global health), Benjamin Druss (health policy and management). Alison Brooks 14MPH (global environmental health) received the Boren Fellowship from the Institute of International Education to study abroad. Tiffany Hammond 09C 14MPH (global health) was selected as an alternate. Hannah Cooper (behavioral sciences and health education) co-created and co-edited a special issue of the International Journal of Drug Policy that examines advances in geographic research on drug policy and drug users' health. Peter Liu 14MPH recieved the Charles C. Shepard Award for best presentatiuon of a nominated thesis. Madeleine Solomon (director, policy and community programs, Tobacco Technical Assistance Consortium) was selected by the CDC as an expert voice in a new video and podcast series to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Surgeon General's Report on Smoking and Health. Lisa Tedesco (behavioral sciences and health education and dean of the Laney Graduate School) received a 2014 ADEAGies Award from the American Dental Education Association's Gies Foundation for her achievements as a dental educator.
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*View all Rollins events on our online calendar Aug. 20: Orientation begins for new students. Aug. 26: Rollinsteer Day. Aug. 27: Fall classes begin. Oct. 4: Fall Open House: Destination Public Health, 9 a.m. - 3 p.m., RSPH. Register. |
| May 2014
A spring of celebration
On May 12, we wished our graduating class well as they continue forth in their public health careers in the United States and around the world. We also celebrated a semester of accomplishments among our faculty and students. Carlos del Rio, Hubert Professor and chair of the Hubert Department of Global Health, received the Thomas Jefferson Award, Emory's highest award honoring a faculty or staff member for significant service to the university.
He is the director for clinical sciences and international research of the Emory Center for AIDS Research and directs the Emory AIDS International Training and Research Program. He also is a professor of medicine at Emory School of Medicine and chief of the infectious disease service at Emory University Hospital. The award follows another distinguished honor for Carlos. In October, he was elected to the Institute of Medicine, one of the highest distinctions in health and medicine. He is a most deserving recipient of both honors.
Megan Light 14C, an anthropology and human biology major, received the Marion Luther Brittain Award, the university's highest student honor for service to Emory and the greater community, at Commencement. The award also comes with a $5,000 check, which she can put to good use when she enrolls in Rollins this fall. Light thought she wanted to go to medical school, but her work with Jorge Vidal Graniel, assistant professor of global health, on a study on pneumonia in South Africa and with Christine Moe, the Eugene J. Gangarosa Professor of Safe Water and Sanitation, on a rapid assessment tool to examine fecal contamination, introduced her to public health, and she changed her post-graduation plans. We are glad she did. Kimberly Jacob Arriola, associate professor of behavioral sciences and health education, accepted Emory's highest teaching honor, the Emory Williams Teaching Award. Hannah Cooper, associate professor of behavioral sciences and health education, received the Thomas F. Sellers Award for exemplifying the ideals of public health and serving as a role model to her colleagues. Alexandra Ingber 14MPH accepted the James W. Alley Award for service to disadvantaged populations. We presented Jacqueline Cutts 14MPH and Julia Still 14MPH with the Eugene J. Gangarosa Award for creative solutions in global health. Cutts founded Safe Mothers, Safe Babies in Uganda, and Still works with the Latino community in Atlanta and Central and South America. In addition, the Rollins Student Government Association named Victoria Phillips (health policy and management) as its Professor of the Year and Emily Lakemaker (assistant director of admissions, student services) as its Staff Person of the Year. McBride named chair of behavioral sciences and health education
Colleen McBride will join the RSPH as Rollins Professor and chair of the Department of Behavioral Sciences and Health Education, effective July 2014. She comes to Emory from the National Human Genome Research Institute of the National Institutes of Health, where she has served as founding chief and senior investigator of the Social and Behavioral Research Branch. McBride's research focuses on innovative public health interventions to promote risk-reducing behaviors, specifically using genetic information to motivate healthy behaviors. Genetic information, scientists believe, eventually will allow lifestyle interventions to be personalized to make compliance with healthy behaviors easier. McBride held academic positions at the University of Washington as well as Duke University Medical Center, where she served as chief of the Division of Prevention Research in the Department of Community and Family Medicine. At Duke, she was director of the Cancer Prevention and Control Research Program. She has held adjunct faculty appointments in the Gillings School of Global Public Health at the University of North Carolina and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Happy birthday, Richard Hubert
This year's graduating class included 12 students from the King Abdullah Fellowship Program from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The graduates were recently honored at a May 2 celebration. The program supports public health and health care professionals in Saudi Arabia who wish to earn an MPH from Rollins. All the students have positions with the kingdom's Ministry of Health, take a leave of absence to complete their degrees, and then return to new jobs with a promotion after graduation. "We're practicing global public health diplomacy," says Scott McNabb, research professor of global health and epidemiology and program director. McNabb and his team travel to Riyadh every January to meet with prospective students for the fall class. They help candidates flesh out their educational goals and talk about the application process, including writing a professional resume and personal statements. Once here at Rollins, students and their families receive English language training and cultural norm instruction. In the fall, 22 new fellows will join Rollins for a total of 36 in the school. McNabb has started an alumni group in Riyadh to further promote the fellowships. One alumnus is leading surveillance in the Jeddah region of the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), and another directs the national diabetes program.
New grants: An HIV prevention app
Patrick Sullivan (epidemiology) and Rob Stephenson (global health) were awarded more than $550,000 by the MAC AIDS Fund to develop an HIV prevention mobile app for men having sex with men (MSM). The app, which will be tested in Atlanta and Seattle in the fall, allows users to receive personalized recommendations based on questions they answer and a list of sites near them for testing and/or counseling. The app also provides the ability to schedule test appointments and to access other services from community HIV/AIDS organizations or public health departments. "We will never replace counseling services with an app, but we can help men find the testing services that work best for them," Sullivan says. "This app just facilitates the right engagement. It leads you to services and even gives you driving, transit, or walking directions, and that helps eliminate barriers to accessing health care." The funding helped Sullivan and his research team to conduct focus groups of MSM of all ages and to work with public health departments and community organization to integrate their services into the app. He hopes to make the app available to more cities. Vicki Hertzberg (biostatistics) received $177,000 from the Boeing Corporation to investigate possible routes of infectious disease transmission in commercial air travel. In the Fly Healthy study, she and Georgia Tech mathematics professor Howard Weiss are looking at the interactions between passengers and flight attendants, as well as sampling airplanes for viruses and bacteria. Michael Goodman (epidemiology) received $220,000 from the National Cancer Institute to study the effectiveness of vitamin D and calcium supplements on lowering the risk of colon cancer. Patients who had at least one benign colon polyp took the pills daily until they had another colonoscopy, three or five years later. Goodman and his research team found that the supplements did not reduce the risk over the three- to five-year time span. Rollins faculty also received more than 150 other grants for research and training from October through mid-April. View the complete list.
Zenobia Wright, Senior Research Interviewer, Behavioral Sciences and Health Education Staff promotions
Chandra McElhaney to Coordinator, Education Program, Career Services
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