Dean Howard Frumkin has announced two new $1,000 annual awards made possible by a private gift to the School.  SPH staff, faculty, and students (including recent graduates) are eligible for both awards.  

The Making a Difference Award will recognize work that demonstrably advances the health and well-being of people.  While the focus is on efforts in Washington State, work done outside the state, including globally, may be nominated.  This award reflects and honors the service component of our School's mission.  Entries will be judged by how they "made a difference" and led to a change that benefited a community's health. An example is the recent student project that demonstrated that traffic light timing was substantially less safe for pedestrians in Rainier Valley than in Ballard.  The study was presented to the Seattle Department of Transportation and led to retiming the lights along Rainier Ave South.  

Please send nominations for the Making a Difference Award to Tao Sheng Kwan-Gett, kwangett@uw.edu.  The 2015 award will recognize work during calendar year 2014 (this could be the date the project was carried out, and/or the date the health impact occurred).  The nomination should include a one-page summary of the work that was done (how, what, when, where) and why it made a difference, as well as a one-page letter of support from an external partner (e.g. an agency or community-based organization).  

The Communicating Public Health to the Public Award will recognize an op-ed or op-ed equivalent (an article, blog post, TED talk, video, PechaKucha presentation, speech, etc.) that effectively communicates public health issues to the general public, on a significant scale.  Recent examples include Seattle Times opinion columns calling for greater national attention to public health (by Stephen Bezruchka), for childhood vaccinations (by Katie McCabe), for consideration of human health and well-being in the context of Seattle’s Duwamish River EPA cleanup plan (by Bill Daniell and Tao Kwan-Gett), a New York Times op-ed on fighting Ebola (by Karin Huster), and James Pfeiffer’s KPLU interview about the Ebola outbreak in West Africa.

Please send nominations for the Communicating Public Health to the Public Award to Catherine Shen, cshen489@uw.edu.  The nomination should consist of the op-ed, video, article, or blog, together with the name of the publication if applicable, and/or a brief description of the medium in which it was released.  If available, please include information on the likely audience and reach (e.g. circulation figures for a newspaper, readership for a blog posting).  

These awards will be made for the first time at the School’s annual awards ceremony in the spring of 2015.  Nominees must have done the work while matriculated or employed at SP.