Newswise — New York (October 28, 2014)— Public health’s most prestigious honor, the Frank A. Calderone Prize, was presented this morning to H. Jack Geiger, MD, founding member and past president of Physicians for Social Responsibility and Physicians for Human Rights. Dean Linda P. Fried of the Mailman School of Public Health presented the award at a morning ceremony at the Paley Center for Media in Midtown.
Dr. Geiger, who is also Arthur C. Logan Professor of Community Medicine Emeritus, City University of New York Medical School, designed the community health center model in the United States. Illustrating the direct relationship between poverty and poor health, Dr. Geiger built a national network that provides high-quality healthcare to 23 million people at more than 1,200 centers around the country. Although the first two community health centers were in the Mississippi Delta and in Boston, Dr. Geiger’s work brought him as far as South Africa, the West Bank, and Yugoslavia during times of political strife, demonstrating that population health would always lag among groups who struggle for freedom.
At the award ceremony, Dr. Geiger delivered an original lecture entitled, “The Political Future of Public Health in a Time of Demographic Change,” [link to livestream speech] arguing that public health must enter the political arena equipped with activist tools from recent history: “Our task is to aggressively use all the ways we can find to tell the public the facts we know about the causes and processes that link poverty and health and, in multiple ways, damage our society.”
Administered by the Mailman School, the Calderone Prize has been awarded to public health luminaries since 1992. Previous winners include Peter Piot, MD, former Executive Director, UNAIDS, and Under Secretary-General, United Nations; Mary Robinson, MA, former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and former President of Ireland; and Nafis Sadik, MD, Special Advisor to the Secretary-General of the UN and former Executive Director, United Nations Population Fund.
In her remarks, Dean Fried, called Dr. Geiger a public health legend belonging to an entire generation. “In a career spanning more than five decades and every continent, he has demonstrated the inextricable links between human rights and health. His work has been foundational, for his fellow researchers and students, for clinicians, and for countless human lives, he has saved through affirmation and advocacy.”
The Calderone Prize is awarded every two years to an individual who has made a transformational contribution in the field, with selection by an international committee of public health leaders. Its namesake, Frank A. Calderone, had a distinguished career in public health, leading him from the New York City Department of Health to important posts at the World Health Organization. Instrumental in shaping the WHO’s policies and structure, he also raised support for its continued operation. In 1986, the Calderone family established this prize to mark Frank Calderone’s lifelong commitment and recognize exceptional public health leaders.
For downloadable photographs of the ceremony, click here.
To watch the entire ceremony on Livestream, click here.
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