A leading AIDS researcher and an expert on health and resilience will each receive the Yale School of Public’s Health’s highest honor, the Winslow Medal Award, this fall for significant contributions to public health.
Anthony S. Fauci, M.D., director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, will receive the award on October 23 at 3 p.m. in Harkness Auditorium at 333 Cedar Street.
Judith Rodin, Ph.D., president of The Rockefeller Foundation and a former Yale provost, will receive the Winslow Medal on November 2 at noon in the Robert L. McNeil, Jr., Lecture Hall at The Yale University Art Gallery at 1111 Chapel Street.
The award is named after Charles-Edward Amory Winslow, the founder of public health at Yale in 1915 and a leading figure in the modern public health movement in the United States.
As it celebrates its centennial throughout 2015, the school is bestowing three of the awards to leading public health figures. The first centennial-year Winslow Award was presented in May to Sir Michael Marmot, Ph.D., a British expert in health inequities.
“These recipients, Drs. Fauci, Rodin and Marmot, embody the highest ideals of Winslow and his commitment to better health for all,” said Dean Paul Cleary “We are honored to recognize each of them with this very special award.”
Anthony Fauci
Fauci’s work includes extensive research into ways to prevent, diagnose, and treat infectious diseases, including HIV/AIDS. He serves as one of the key advisors to the White House and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services on global AIDS issues and on initiatives to bolster medical and public health preparedness against emerging infectious diseases.
Following early studies on the human immune system and how infectious diseases impact it, Fauci, then deputy clinical director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAD), and his lab demonstrated the type of defect that occurs in immune cells that enables AIDS to be fatal. In 1984, he became the director of NIAD and the following year the coordinator of all AIDS research at NIH. He has won increasingly large budgets for AIDS research.
Judith Rodin
Rodin will talk about work being done in public health and resilience and will also discuss the development of a new discipline called “planetary health.” This field of study involves safeguarding both human health and the natural systems that underpin it. Its relevance has grown as the degradation of our air, water, and land has resulted in disease-pattern changes and the emergence of new diseases.
A leader in academia, science, and global development, Rodin was trained as a research psychologist. After completing her Ph.D. at Columbia University, she joined the faculty of New York University as an assistant professor of psychology. She came to Yale in 1972 and was named provost in 1992. She served as president of the University of Pennsylvania from 1994 to 2004.
These recipients, Drs. Fauci, Rodin and Marmot, embody the highest ideals of Winslow and his commitment to better health for all.
Dean Paul Cleary
While at Yale, Rodin earned an international reputation as both a pioneer of the women’s health movement and as one of the early psychologists to master both the biological and psychological factors that lead to obesity. Rodin has written or co-written15 books including her most recent, The Resilience Dividend: Being Strong in a World Where Things Go Wrong. . Rodin has been named to Forbes’ 100 Most Powerful Women list three years in a row.
Sir Michael Marmot
Earlier this year, a Winslow Award was presented to Sir Michael Marmot, professor of Epidemiology and Public Health, University College London. Marmot has led research groups on health inequalities for more than 35 years. He was Chair of the Commission on Social Determinants of Health (CSDH), which was set up by the World Health Organization in 2005. He chaired the Breast Screening Review for the National Health Service National Cancer Action Team and was a member of the Lancet-University of Oslo Commission on Global Governance for Health.
Marmot, who is an expert on aging, is a Principal Investigator of the Whitehall II Studies of British Civil Servants investigating how social influences affect disease. In 2000, he was knighted by Her Majesty The Queen for services to epidemiology and the understanding of health inequalities.
Previous Winslow Awards
Previous Winslow Awards have been presented to Sir Richard Doll, professor of medicine at the University of Oxford (he died in 2005 at the age of 93); William Foege, the emeritus presidential distinguished professor of international health at the Emory School of Public Health; and Sir Iain Chalmers, founder of the Cochrane Collaboration, the leading creator an repository of systematic reviews of evidence-based health care across the medical and public health spectrum.
The Winslow Award, also known as the Winslow Medal, was created in 1999. The recipients’ work exemplifies Winslow’s ideals, particularly his concern for the social factors affecting health, as well as their achievements in public health leadership, scholarship and contribution to society.
C.-E. A. Winslow
The Yale School of Public Health was founded in 1915 by C.-E. A. Winslow, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate who taught at the University of Chicago, the College of the City of New York and Columbia University before coming to Yale. He served as professor and chairman of the Yale School of Medicine’s Department of Public Health from its inception, in 1915. Over the course of Winslow’s 30-year tenure as professor and chair, he brought considerable acclaim to Yale.
In his first decade, Winslow established a comprehensive non-medical program that graduated 18 students with a Certificate in Public Health, 10 with a Ph.D., and four with a D.Ph. Yale University School of Medicine was the first academic institution to recognize the importance of public health and to establish a degree-granting program in the field. In 1946, the Council on Education accredited the program Winslow started as a school of public health for public health.
Due to Winslow’s foresight and determination, many of the advances in public health came from contributions made by Yale faculty, including a greater understanding of vector-borne diseases, HIV/AIDS prevention, and the effects of air pollution on respiratory health.