2009 Accolades
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Fall 2009
Honors for UM SPH at the November 2009 American Public Health Association Annual Meeting included :
- HBHE chair Marc Zimmerman received an award from the American Psychological Association (Division 27) for his Distinguished Contribution to Theory and Research for the Society for Community Research and Action.
- Student Allison Brenner was a 2009 Vivian Drenckhahn scholarship award winner.
 Epidemiology's Ana Diez Roux has been elected to the Institute of Medicine. Election to the IOM is considered one of the highest honors in the fields of health and medicine and recognizes individuals who have demonstrated outstanding professional achievement and commitment to service. Dr. Diez Roux is director of both the Center for Social Epidemiology and Population Health and the Center for Integrative Approaches to Health Disparities. She is an epidemiologist whose work has focused on the examination of the social determinants of health, and she has been an international leader in the social epidemiology of cardiovascular disease, the application of multilevel analysis in epidemiology, and the investigation of neighborhood health effects.
 Having quickly become established as one of the premier new minds in the field of evolutionary psychology, HBHE's Daniel Kruger has received a 2009 University of Michigan Research Faculty Recognition Award. In 2008 and 2009, Kruger published nearly 20 peer-reviewed papers. His studies on male propensity for risk from an evolutionary perspective may be his best known, having been highly cited and publicized in news media. His work demonstrates that the tendency for males to experience early mortality during young adulthood (at disproportionately higher rates than females) is best explained by an evolutionary perspective focusing on male-male competition as a core feature of our species during life stages most associated with mate acquisition.
Summer 2009
 UM SPH's Arnold Monto will receive the 2009 Alexander
Fleming Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA). It is given in recognition of a career that reflects major contributions to the acquisition and
dissemination of knowledge about infectious diseases. It will be presented at the 47th annual meeting of IDSA in Philadelphia in October. Monto is an internationally known flu expert who regularly consults on the design of the
annual influenza vaccine.
UM SPH's Matthew Boulton was recently presented with an award by the Chinese government for initiating the highly successful China Scholar Exchange Program between UM SPH and the Tianjin Centers for Disease Control and for his work in assisting China with infectious disease control efforts.
 The Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality (SSSS) selected UM SPH's Mark Padilla to receive its John Money Award for 2009, given annually by the Eastern Region of the SSSS to
a scholar who has made significant contributions to the understanding of human sexuality. Padilla was keynote speaker at the SSSS conference in June, where he received the award. It recognizes his work on masculinity and sexuality in
the Dominican Republic. More on Padilla's work in Findings magazine.
 Doug Schaubel, associate professor of biostatistics, and Qing Pan, a
2007 graduate of the Biostatistics Department, were presented with the Canadian Journal of Statistics Award for Best Paper of 2008. The article, "Proportional hazards models based on biased samples and estimated selection probabilities," was recognized for outstanding quality of the methodological
innovation and presentation. The work was based on Qing's dissertation. Qing is now an assistant professor of Statistics at George Washington University.
Spring 2009
Several awards were presented to UM SPH students at the American Industrial Hygiene Conference and Exposition in Toronto in early June.
- Sun Kyu Kim was awarded Best Poster in Occupational and Environmental Medicine for: "Prototype Micro Gas Chromatograph for the Determination of
Lung Cancer Biomarkers in Human Breath" (co-authors: Hungwei Chang and Edward T. Zellers)
- Gustavo Serrano was awarded Best Poster in Gas and Vapor Systems for "Prototype Micro Gas Chromatograph for High-Speed Determinations of Explosive Vapors" (co- authors: Hungwei Chang and Edward T. Zellers)
- AIHA scholarships went to Kevin Abernathy and Bufford Ang; Ang also won the 23rd Annual 3M Industrial Hygiene Scholarship Award.
Laurie Svoboda, Toxicology Ph.D. student in EHS, has won a prestigious American Heart Association predoctoral fellowship. Svoboda is carrying out her research on chemical modification of potassium channels in the heart under the supervision of Dr. Jeffrey Martens in the UM Department of Pharmacology. Her academic advisor in the EHS Toxicology Program is Dr. Rudy J. Richardson. Another EHS Toxicology student of Dr. Richardson's, Sanjeeva Wijeyesakere, has earned two new honors:
- Best Abstract Award of the Neurotoxicology Specialty Section of the Society of Toxicology (along with Jeanne A. Stuckey, and Rudy J. Richardson), and
- Third-place Society of Toxicology Carl C. Smith Graduate Student Award for Mechanisms Research (which carries a cash prize).
 UM SPH alumnus Dr. James Comer, M.P.H. '64, has been awarded the 2009 Romani Award by the UM SPH Alumni Society Board of Governors. This honor recognizes Dr. Comer, the Maurice Falk Professor of Child Psychiatry at the Yale University Child Study Center and the founder of the Comer School Development Program, for his outstanding and ongoing contributions to the health and well-being of children in communities across the country. His method of improving schools and scholastic performance, particularly in public, inner-city, low-income schools, focuses not only on the educational experience of the students, but also on their psychosocial needs. The "Comer Model" brings together school, family, and neighborhood. It is today utilized in more than 1,000 schools and 26 states and has positively affected countless lives. While receiving the Romani Award in Ann Arbor on April 2, Dr. Comer described his time at UM SPH as "a pivotal experience to focus on prevention." Named in honor of Professor Emeritus John Romani, the award is presented to alumni who have demonstrated outstanding career accomplishments.
Tina Sang has been named Student Social Worker of the Year by the Southeastern Michigan Chapter of the National Association of Social Workers. A joint degree student in the UM School of Social Work and SPH's department of Health Behavior and Health Education, Sang is recognized for leadership qualities, commitment to political and community activities, academic performance, and more.
This year's Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan Foundation's McDevitt Excellence in Research Award in health policy goes to UM SPH professors of health management and policy Richard Hirth and Scott Greer, and their co-authors, for "Out-of-pocket spending and medication adherence among dialysis patients in 12 countries." The paper appeared in the journal Health Affairs on Jan. 8, 2008. This McDevitt Excellence in Research Award is presented annually to the best health policy paper published by researchers from the state of Michigan. More info on the findings regarding medication adherence and why cost isn't the only factor that determines whether patients take prescription drugs.
 Cleo Caldwell has been selected to receive an Outstanding Research Mentorship award in April, to recognize her contributions to the development of future young scientists and researchers. She was nominated by her UM Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program mentee, Ama Achampong, who said, "Dr. Caldwell has been extremely supportive. I have learned a great deal about disparities in African American birth outcomes and research methods by working with Dr. Caldwell, and a great deal about myself."
Winter 2009
On March 11 in New York, Ronald M. Davis, M.D., was honored by the American Legacy Foundation with a posthumous Lifetime Achievement Award for his distinguished tobacco control efforts. Former Surgeon General Dr. C. Everett Koop, a mentor and long-time friend to Dr. Davis, presented the award to his widow, Nadine Davis. A former UM SPH adjunct faculty member, Dr. Davis for many years tirelessly promoted health in our nation, serving as president of the American Medical Association in the year before his death. He is also honored at UM SPH with a scholarship fund in his name.
Allison Aiello has been named John G. Searle Assistant Professor of Epidemiology at UM SPH, effective March 1, 2009. Aiello works on multidisciplinary approaches for assessing antibiotic resistance in the community, clinical, and institutional settings. She also studies social context of disease and infectious diseases in elderly minority populations. She's co-PI on the M-Flu study at UM.
Several UM SPH students have been named as awardees in the 2009 UM Rackham Predoctoral Fellowship competition. They will receive a stipend of $27,000 over three terms, plus candidacy tuition. The SPH students include:Ying Ding in Biostatistics, Nancy Fleischer and Jennifer Smith in Epidemiology, and Simone Rauscher and Pamela McCann in Health Management & Policy. Jun Ding of Biostatistics is an alternate.
UM SPH Environmental Health Sciences professor Jerome Nriagu is the recipient of a $75,000 Humboldt Research Award in recognition of lifetime achievements in research, and in encouragement of international collaboration. Dr. Nriagu is working with colleagues
in Heidelberg, Germany, through July 2009 on research related to thallium isotopes as novel tracers of global climate change.
 UM SPH's Marie S. O’Neill, an assistant professor of Environmental Health Sciences and Epidemiology, has been selected to receive an NIEHS Outstanding New Environmental Scientists (ONES) award. She is among 6 young investigators to earn the highly competitive award from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) in 2008. The grant funds five years of research at $250,000 per year. O'Neill is studying exposures of pregnant women to air pollution in Mexico City and the link to preterm births through in vitro and in vivo studies of inflammatory response to air pollutants. More info on the award.
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