>David William Kennedy Acheson, MD, FRCP
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The Role of Partnership in a Public Health System
Louis Rowitz, PhD
Professor, Community Health Sciences, University of Illinois at Chicago, School of Public Health
Partnerships are an integral part of any public health system. The perspectives and resources of many different agencies and organizations are needed to address the complex social and health problems facing our communities today. This presentation will explore levels of commitment in partnerships and highlight other key components that can enhance the ability of a system to promote and improve the public's health.
Dr. Louis Rowitz has built a unique career in public health academia via public health practice issues and initiatives. Serving as the Deputy Director of University of Illinois, Chicago, School of Public Health's (UIC) Center for Public Health Practice since it began, he is also the first director of a state-based leadership institute funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Since 1992, that Institute, originally the Illinois Public Health Leadership Institute, now called the Mid-America Regional Public Health Leadership Institute (MARPHLI), has encompassed as many as four states and currently includes teams from Indiana, Wisconsin, and Illinois. The Institute has graduated over 500 Fellows since its inception. Dr. Rowitz is one of the founding members of the National Public Health Leadership Development Network (NLN,) established in 1994 with funding from CDC, to support the growth and improve access to public health leadership institutes across the country. Throughout the past 12 years, Dr. Rowitz has served in numerous roles including chairing various NLN committees and workgroups. He currently serves as the Chair of the NLN Board, leading the Network and its members into a new vision for public health leadership development. Dr. Rowitz consults with CDC on leadership issues and gives presentations on leadership to national and local public health organizations and agencies throughout the United States.
Dr. Rowitz has added two more leadership training institutes to the UIC Center for Public Health Practice, including the Illinois Institute for Maternal and Child Health Leadership and the Illinois MCH DataUse Academy. In 2001, he became the Director of the Mid-America Public Health Training Center with its mission to improve public health infrastructure through training of the public health workforce and he currently serves on the faculty of the International Center for Leadership Development, also located at the UIC, School of Public Health. Dr. Rowitz has published a text on leadership in public health based upon his experience in developing the institutes. It is PUBLIC HEALTH LEADERSHIP: Putting Principles Into Practice (Aspen, 2001) which is now the premier text in leadership courses and institutes across the country. He has been a frequent contributor to the Journal of Public Health Management and Practice and is now in the process of writing a new book focusing on governance and boards of health in the United States. Dr. Rowitz has served as a consultant to the states of Michigan, Ohio, Mississippi, Alabama, Oklahoma, Louisiana and abroad in Ireland on their leadership program initiatives.
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Combating the Problem of Youth Violence: Context and Coordination
Deborah Gorman-Smith, PhD
Professor of Psychology in Psychiatry, Institute for Juvenile Research, Department of Psychiatry, University of Illinois at Chicago
There is no simple answer to reducing youth violence. The problem is multiply determined and requires coordinated effort at multiple levels and across systems. Individual, family, peer and community factors interact to increase risk for youth involvement in violence and the nature of the influence and interaction among these variables are different across stages of development. Because of the complexity of the issue, communities need to work together to integrate a program of activities designed to address the problem of youth violence by focusing on children and families at different developmental ages and with youth with varying levels of associated risk and involvement. Dr. Gorman-Smith will discuss efforts coordinated through the Chicago Center for Youth Violence Prevention, working with agencies that have the most direct influence on youth at different stages of development – families, schools, community agencies, justice – to focus on both on primary prevention (working with young children, their families and schools) and intervention directed toward “deep-end” youth; those already actively engaged in antisocial and violent behavior. Central is the understanding that context matters – characteristics of the neighborhood and community in which youth and families reside are important in both impacting risk and in the development of effective interventions.
Deborah Gorman-Smith is Professor of Psychology in Psychiatry at the Institute for Juvenile Research, Department of Psychiatry, University of Illinois at Chicago. Her program of research is focused on advancing knowledge about development, risk, and prevention of aggression and violence, with specific focus on minority youth living in poor urban settings. Dr. Gorman-Smith has been or currently is Principal or Co-Principal Investigator on a federally funded Center and several longitudinal risk and prevention studies. She is currently the Principal Investigator of a CDC-P funded Academic Center of Excellence for Youth Violence Prevention. She is also Principal Investigator of the Chicago Youth Development Study, a longitudinal study of risk and positive development among African American and Latino youth in Chicago; Co-PI of SAFE Children, a longitudinal preventive intervention targeting elementary age children in inner-city neighborhoods; and Co-PI of GREAT Schools and Families, a mult-site school violence prevention study. She has spent much of her career focused on studying risk and prevention within the context of economically disadvantaged urban neighborhoods, with a particular interest in understanding variation in risk and intervention effects by neighborhood context.
Dr. Gorman-Smith has served on several national and international committees, contributing to reports important to the health and well-being of children and families. She was chapter leader on the UN Secretary General’s Study on Violence Against Children (WHO; October, 2006), responsible for the chapter on violence by and against children within community settings. She served on the Committee on Urban Initiatives through the Public Policy Directorate of the American Psychological Association (2002 to 2005) and on a separate Task Force on Urban Psychology formed through the same division of APA, which issued the report “Toward an Urban Psychology: Research, action, and Policy” (2005). She has served on the Board of Directors for the Society for Prevention Research since 2001. She is currently a Senior Fellow at the Coalition for Evidence Based Policy, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that works to improve the performance of government and the connections between government and citizens based in Washington D.C.
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Responding to Health Risks of Climate Change: New Directives for Sustainable Public Health
Jonathan Patz, MD, MPH
Associate Professor, Environmental Studies and Population Health Sciences; Director, Global Environmental Health, University of Wisconsin – Madison
While melting polar regions, crop failures, and storm disasters dominate the public discourse on global warming, human health risks from climate changeare of high concern in the public health field. This presentation will provide quantitative case studies showing exposure pathways through which climate change can alter risks of diseases around the globe. Yet, climate change cannot be viewed in isolation of other environmental factors such as unhealthy urban design and deforestation. Mitigating climate change by changing our transportation, energy and agricultural policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions may potentially become the largest public health opportunity that we have seen in over a century. This presentation will point to some of these substantial and exciting opportunities.
Professor Patz is an Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Environmental Health Sciences at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and also an Affiliate Scientist of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). He has served on three National Academy of Sciences committees on reports addressing environmental public health and is on the Board of Scientific Counselors of the CDC, National Center for Environmental Health.
He co-chaired the health sector expert panel of the US National Assessment on Climate Variability and Change, is Convening Lead Author for the United Nations/World Bank Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, and lead author since 1994 on several United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports and WHO monographs on climate change. Professor Patz is President of the International Association for Ecology and Health and Co-Editor for the journal, Ecohealth: Conservation Medicine and Ecosystem Sustainability, and Co-editor of the textbook, Ecosystem Change and Public Health: A Global Perspective (2001), and has written over 75 peer-reviewed papers addressing the health effects of global environmental change.
From 1996-2000, he was principal investigator for the largest US multi-institutional study on climate change health risks and has briefed the US Congress, Administration, and federal agency leaders. His areas of research investigation include effects of climate change on heat waves, air pollution and water- and vector-borne diseases, as well as links between deforestation and malaria in the Amazon.
Professor Patz has earned medical board certification in both Occupational/Environmental Medicine and Family Medicine and received his medical degree from Case Western Reserve University and his Master of Public Health (MPH) degree from Johns Hopkins University. In 2005, he received an Aldo Leopold Leadership Fellows Award, in 2006 shared the Zayed International Prize for the Environment and in 2007 shared the Nobel Peace Prize (awarded to the IPCC and Al Gore).
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FDA’s Food Protection Plan
David William Kennedy Acheson, MD, FRCP
Associate Commissioner for Foods, US Food and Drug Administration
The talk will describe the changes and challenges that led to the development of the Food Protection Plan, followed by a discussion of the scope of the FPP and the main components of the plan and how they fit into other major activities related to foods. This will cover activities such as the Import Safety Action Plan and the MOA with China. Finally there will be a discussion of the implementation of the plan and some of the activities around the current key priorities.
Dr. David William Kennedy Acheson graduated from the University of London Medical School in 1980, and following training in internal medicine and infectious diseases in the United Kingdom, moved to the New England Medical Center and Tufts University in Boston in 1987. As an Associate Professor at Tufts University, he undertook basic molecular pathogenesis research on foodborne pathogens, especially Shiga toxin-producing E. coli. In 2001, Dr. Acheson moved his laboratory to the University of Maryland Medical School in Baltimore to continue research on foodborne pathogens.
In September 2002, Dr. Acheson became the Chief Medical Officer at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition (CFSAN). In January 2004, he was named Director of CFSAN’s Food Safety and Security Staff. In January 2005, the mission of the office was expanded and renamed the Office of Food Safety, Defense and Outreach; in January 2007 it was further expanded to become the Office of Food Defense, Communication and Emergency Response. In May 2007, the Commissioner of Food and Drugs, Andrew von Eschenbach, appointed Dr. Acheson the Assistant Commissioner for Food Protection to provide advice and counsel to the Commissioner on strategic and substantive food safety and food defense matters. In January 2008, Dr. von Eschenbach expanded Dr. Acheson's portfolio by naming him Associate Commissioner of Foods, which gives him an agency-wide leadership role for all food and feed issues, including health promotion and nutrition.
Dr. Acheson has published extensively and is internationally recognized both for his public health expertise in food safety and his research in infectious diseases. Additionally, Dr. Acheson is a fellow of both the Royal College of Physicians (London) and the Infectious Disease Society of America.