JHSPH Home Editor's Note | Welch Wanderings Elite Honors for Senior Faculty
Three of the Bloomberg School’s own were recently bestowed with some of public health’s greatest honors. Dean Alfred Sommer, MD, MHS ’73, was awarded this year’s Pollin Prize for Pediatric Research. Sommer’s groundbreaking discoveries, begun in the early 1980s, led to the widespread use of inexpensive vitamin A supplements that reduce childhood mortality by 34 percent in the developing world, saving millions of children’s lives. The World Bank ranked vitamin A supplementation among the most cost-effective health interventions in all of medicine. The Pollin Prize includes a $100,000 research award for the honoree and a $100,000 fellowship stipend that the recipient may award to a young investigator working in a related area. Sommer selected Parul Christian, DrPH ’97, an associate professor of International Health. For the past decade, Christian has explored links between the nutritional deficiencies of mothers and increased infant mortality in the developing world. Sommer is the first individual researcher to receive the Pollin Prize. Previously, the award has gone to teams of researchers. Jonathan Samet, MD, MS, chair of Epidemiology and the Jacob I and Irene B. Fabrikant Professor of Health, Risk and Society, received the 2004 Prince Mahidol Award for public health. Samet was recognized for his research into the effect of air pollution on human health. His work has been part of the basis for air quality control in the United States and elsewhere.Left: Prince Mahidol Award winner Jonathan Samet [Credit: Keith Weller]. Right: New IOM member Diane Griffin [Credit: Mark Lee]. Diane Griffin, PhD, MD, a renowned leader in the research of viral diseases and the Alfred and Jill Sommer chair of the School’s W. Harry Feinstone Department of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology, was elected into the Institute of Medicine (IOM) of the National Academies last October. (Her husband, John W. Griffin, director of the Department of Neurology at the School of Medicine, was elected to the IOM at the same time.) Diane Griffin’s research focuses on how viruses cause disease. She is also investigating measles, a disease that continues to be a major killer of children in developing countries. —Greg Rienzi
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