FACULTY, STUDENTS & ALUMNI

Alumni Notes

At the School of Public Health Alumni Association Annual Meeting, the following were elected as officers for 2003-2004: Terry Wheat, RN '78, BSN, MPH '96-president; Georgeen Polyak, PhD '95-president elect; Barbara A. Giloth, DrPH '00-vice president; Karen Peters, DrPH '99, MPH '91-treasurer; and Rose Malinowski, DrPH '97-secretary. Emily Anderson, MPH '00, Sara Deardorff Carter, MPH '00, Renu Gupta, MS, MPH '93, LD, Uche Onwuta, MPH '97, Kimberly Porter, MPH '95, Nikhil Prachand, MPH '02, Sagar Shah, MPH '01, John Marshall-Tar, PhD, MPH '82, and Sherry Weingart, MPH '80 were elected to the Board of Directors. Alumni named to the Delta Omega Society, a national honorary public health fraternity, at the meeting were Claude Jacob, MPH '98, Maureen McDonald, MPH '91, Uche Onwuta, Georgeen Polyak, and John Marshall-Tar.

Adedeji S. Adefuye, MBBS, MPH '99, was elected a fellow of the United Kingdom's Royal Public Health Institute. The institute promotes public health and hygiene through education and training, communication, quality testing, and policy development. Membership is international and represents a cross-section of health professionals and hygiene specialists whose work involves the protection and improvement of public health.

Shari L. Bornstein, MD, MPH '94, was reappointed to the Lake County Board of Health, which she joined in 1999. All members of the twelve-member Board of Health volunteer their time and are responsible for overseeing programs and developing policies for the Lake County Health Department and Community Health Center to promote physical and emotional health, prevent disease, injury, and disability, and protect the environment. Dr. Bornstein has an internal medicine practice in Gurnee.

Joanne C. Despotes, MPH '94, co-wrote "Evaluating HIV Mental Health Training: Changes in Practice and Knowledge for Social Workers and Case Managers," published in the journal Health and Social Work.

David Drury, MPH '92, has been elected president of the Central States Occupational Medical Association (CSOMA), an 800-member, five-state organization dedicated to the field of occupational and environmental medicine. CSOMA is the central states chapter of the American College of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, a national medical society dedicated to promoting the health of workers through preventive medicine, clinical care, research, and education. Dr. Drury is a physician and owner of Trigram, LLP, an occupational medicine clinic in Milwaukee.

Bruce Elegant, MPH '77, is the CEO of Oak Park Hospital. He is on the board of directors of the Oak Park Development Corporation, the Illinois Hospital Association, and the American Lung Association of Metropolitan Chicago.

Memoona Hasnain, MD, MHPE, PhD '02, serves as director of research in UIC's Department of Family Medicine. She presented the keynote speech at a conference entitled My Body, My Spirit, Myself: South Asian Women's Wellness Day, sponsored on the UIC campus by Chicago-area Asian and women's health organizations.

J. A. Herrmann, DVM, MPH '03, is serving as a Congressional Science Fellow in the office of Senator Richard Durbin until August 2004. The Congressional Science Fellowship Program is administered by the American Association for the Advancement of Science and is a highly competitive and fully funded program that has been providing science advisors to Congress for thirty years. The role of fellows is to provide a science and evidence base to inform public policy. There are thirty-four Congressional Science Fellows this year. Dr. Herrmann has been working on primarily public health issues such as regulation of dietary supplements, school food safety, agro-terrorism, and Mad Cow Disease. Dr. Herrmann presented the student address at the spring 2003 graduation ceremony for the MPH program at the UIC College of Medicine at Rockford. He is a diplomate of the American College of Theriogenologists.

Frank B. Hu, MD, PhD '96, MPH '94, associate professor of nutrition and epidemiology, Department of Nutrition, Harvard School of Public Health, was quoted in Newsweek on a study he conducted on the potentially beneficial impact of including nuts in an individual's diet as a means of lowering the risk of developing type II diabetes. The study was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Vincent D. Keenan, MS '81, of Naperville, celebrated his tenth anniversary as executive vice president of the Illinois Academy of Family Physicians. He received the Merv Shalowitz Humanitarian Award from the Illinois Association of Health Plans and the President's Award from the Illinois Academy of Family Physicians.

Carol Krohm, MPH '93, and her husband, Scott Summers, have written Advance Health Care Directives: A Handbook for Professionals, published by the American Bar Association.

Amanda S. Mazur, MPH '02, is employed with the UIC Office of Public Affairs.

Kamran Niaz, MPH '00, is an epidemiologist with the United Nations International Drug Control Programme in which he serves as a lead advisor for the Global Assessment Programme on Drug Abuse. In this capacity, he helps researchers conduct initial assessments on the nature and extent of drug use in Pakistan, Iran, Turkey, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. He uses quantitative and qualitative methods of data collection from different sources to develop a picture of the drug problems faced in those countries to help researchers develop better measures for monitoring the drug abuse situation in their countries.

Kim Nipko, MPH '97, was honored with the John J. Bloomfield Award, presented annually by the American Conference of Governmental Industrial Hygienists to a promising industrial hygienist who has made significant contributions to the profession by pursuing occupational health hazards, primarily through field work.

Gregory Paveza, PhD '86, a professor in the School of Social Work at the University of South Florida, was chosen as an American Council on Education Fellow for 2003-2004. The ACE Fellow program is a national effort to train the next generation of higher education administrators. He will conduct his fellowship at Northern Illinois University under the mentorship of NIU President John G. Peters and Provost Ivan Legg.

Kyran Quinlan, MPH '96, of La Grange Park, uses applied epidemiology to teach pediatric residents about childhood injury prevention research. He is a clinical associate in the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Chicago's Pritzker School of Medicine. Formerly a lieutenant commander in the U.S. Public Health Service's Commissioned Corps, Mr. Quinlan participated in several injury prevention studies which resulted in a reexamination of public policy.

Kelly Ramsey, MD, MPH '99, completed her medical degree at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine in Cleveland in May 2003. At the diploma ceremony, Dr. Ramsey was recognized with the Henry F. Saunders Award in Pediatrics for most outstanding performance in pediatrics. She is now working on a residency in internal medicine/pediatrics at the University Hospitals of Cleveland.

Jamila R. Rashid, PhD, MPH '90, was appointed as the associate director for Minority Health Policy, Planning, and Evaluation in the Office of Minority Health of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The announcement of Dr. Rashid's appointment noted that "her special evaluation accomplishments include a study of child abuse issues for the state of Illinois, a program evaluation of a substance abuse treatment program for Cook County Jail in Illinois, program evaluation of a Chicago Healthy Start Initiative, and a most recent study of influences of low immunization levels in African-American children. Other CDC accomplishments include a temporary assignment as acting deputy branch chief and project officer for Global AIDS in Côte d'Ivoire, West Africa."

Ann (Michalski) Rimington, MPH '02, works for the University of Chicago's Diabetes and Research Training Center. In February 2003, she married Todd Rimington, a medical student at the University of Chicago.

George Smith, Jr., MPH '96, is director of the Office of Community Health of the Healthcare Consortium of Illinois. Among the programs he oversees is Healthy Start Southeast Chicago, an infant-mortality-reduction initiative serving six communities on the far South Side of Chicago. Mr. Smith is also immediate past president of the UIC School of Public Health Alumni Association.

Lorna Thorpe, PhD '00, left the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Division of Tuberculosis Elimination to assume a position as the CDC epidemiologist assignee to the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene in the department's new Division of Epidemiology. Her new assignment will be with the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, and her task will be to improve the city's chronic disease epidemiology capacity and conduct epidemiologic investigations on risk factors for chronic diseases. Dr. Thorpe's contributions to international tuberculosis control during her two previous years as an Epidemic Intelligence Service officer were recognized by the conferring of the 2002 Paul C. Schnitker International Health Award.

Linda Van Horn, PhD '83, RD, is a professor of preventive medicine within the Department of Preventive Medicine at the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University. Dr. Van Horn was named editor of the Journal of the American Dietetic Association effective June 1, 2003.

Mary Kate Weber, MPH '97, was the lead author of a report entitled "National Task Force on Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and Fetal Alcohol Effect: Defining the National Agenda for Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and Other Prenatal Alcohol-related Effects" in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. Ms. Weber serves as behavioral scientist for the Fetal Alcoholism Syndrome Prevention Team at the National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities.

Sherry E. Weingart, MPH, '80, serves as special programs coordinator within the School of Public Health's Center for Public Health Practice. With other members of West Side Medical Center Peace Action, she co-authored a letter to the editor that appeared in the Chicago Tribune  delineating the adverse effects of the war against Iraq on the health of Americans on diverse levels.

Barry Wenig, MPH '93, was appointed head of the Division of Otolaryngology at Evanston Northwestern Healthcare. Nationally known for his expertise in head and neck cancer surgery, Dr. Wenig has been a member of the ENH Medical Group for three years and previously served as head of the Section on Head and Neck Surgery.

Brandon Zagorski, MS '02, and colleagues' work with the Working Bikes Cooperative was featured on the June 5 edition of "Worldview" on WBEZ, the Chicago National Public Radio station. Working Bikes Cooperative recovers landfill-bound bicycles, repairs them to working condition, and sells them to Chicagoans at a low cost in order to fund shipments of bicycles and bike parts to developing countries. Mr. Zagorski, a statistical consultant and research epidemiologist, has volunteered with the organization for three years.

Alumnae Megan Zimbeck, MPH '02, and Maria Camargo, MPH '02, returned to the School of Public Health to present "An Open Dialogue with Public Health Alumni on Finding Strategies That Work for You in Job Search" in the first of two alumni mentoring programs for students. Pamela J. Para, RN, MPH '91, CPHRM, and Rebecca Wurtz, MD, MPH '94, followed with "An Open Dialogue with Public Health Alumni about Career Development." Response from students was outstanding, and the alumni mentoring series will be continued in the future.