Ted Witek is YSPH’s Distinguished Alumnus for 2024

Criteria for the Yale School of Public Health’s Distinguished Alumni Award includes leadership in public health as an outstanding teacher, researcher or practitioner; exceptional contributions to public health practice; and a sustained contribution to community and society.

Ted Witek, MPH ‘82, checks all those boxes. The YSPH alumni awards committee noted that Witek has “an extraordinary level of achievement in all of these areas and a very distinguished career in the field of public health.”

Witek received this year's Distinguished Alumni Award at the Association of Yale Alumni in Public Health (AYAPH) Awards Luncheon on October 17, 2024, at the New Haven Lawn Club.

For over 40 yeas, Witek has made significant contributions to the field of public health, first as a researcher and later as a corporate executive and academic. His research on the impact of air quality on respiratory illness was cited as evidence to strengthen air quality standards in the U.S. Clean Air Act.

Witek dedicated decades of his career to the development of pharmaceutical drugs to treat respiratory airflow obstruction. Applying the model of induced viral infection, he worked on a team that attenuated upper respiration infection using ICAM-1, the soluble fraction of the viral receptor for rhinovirus. He also applied laser Doppler velocimetry to measure nasal blood flow.

He was known in the pharmaceutical industry for applying a public health framework to his work by ensuring that public health concepts were included in clinical trial designs.

Witek also studied global pandemic preparedness in the years before the COVID pandemic, evaluating preparedness in the U.S., Canada, and South Korea.

“The future of public health,” he said, reflecting on his time at YSPH, “is based in foundational leadership competencies of embracing complexity and uncertainty, in order to ensure that we are poised to do our good in a changing world.”

Witek earned his BS from Quinnipiac College followed by his MPH at Yale and his DrPH at Columbia University. He also earned an MBA from Henley Management College in the United Kingdom. As stated in his nomination letter, “he studied for one reason only: to be satisfied and certain that his achievements and expertise would enable him to move the goalpost forward for the communities he served.”

After decades in industry, Witek became a professor and senior fellow at Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto. In 2020, he was named director of the University of Toronto’s Doctor of Public Health program, the first such degree offering in Canada. In addition to mentoring future public health leaders, he remains focused on new therapeutics to improve patient care.