Centers

This past year has been especially rewarding as we noted with pride as our students and alums excelled in a number of arenas.

Below are some examples of outstanding student and alumni accomplishments:

• Nick Turse (PhD, 2006), has quickly gained nationwide attention for his dissertation and the work that has emerged from it. The dissertation, “Kill Anything that Moves,” is a history of war atrocities by Americans during the Vietnam era that has won numerous prizes. This year he received a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, among the nation’s most prestigious academic awards, for his continuing work uncovering atrocities. He has also been awarded the prestigious Ridenhour Prize for outstanding investigative journalism - a prize whose previous recipients include Bill Moyers, Daniel Ellsberg, Jimmy Carter, Gloria Steinem, and Seymour Hersh - and we are especially proud that Nick has joined them. Finally, he has also been awarded the James Aronson Awards for Social Justice Journalism from the City University of New York. His book, “Kill Anything that Moves,” published by Metropolitan Press, a division of Holt, is expected to be out this coming year.
• Sarah Vogel has been the Program Officer for Environmental Studies at the Johnson Family Foundation (JFF) since January, 2009. Prior to working at JFF, she was the John C. Haas Fellow at the Chemical Heritage Foundation. Her dissertation, titled "The Politics of Plastics: The Economic, Political and Scientific History of Bisphenol A," was nominated for the Allan Nevins Prize of the Organization of American Historians and the Bancroft Student Prize for outstanding History dissertation for 2008. She has been extremely active in environmental health politics and has testified before congress on issues of scientific integrity.
• Ava Alkon, one of our doctoral candidates, won a National Science Foundation Dissertation Award for her work on the history of the consumer movement and health policy. Her dissertation proposal, "Late 20th-Century Consumer Advocacy and the Shaping of Public Health Policy and Practice: An Historical Study of Public Citizen's Health Research Group," also won the The Eugene Litwak Prize, given each year to one doctoral student in the Department for excellence in the preparation of a dissertation research proposal. Ava recently learned that she won a Chemical Heritage Society fellowship, as well.
• Another outstanding PhD candidate, Alison Bateman-House, has earned The Jack Elinson Award, presented to students for published articles of outstanding merit. Her article, "Men of Peace and the Search for the Perfect Pesticide: Conscientious Objectors, the Rockefeller Foundation, and Typhus Control Group" will appear in Public Health Reports in the near future.
• One of our MPH students, Francesco Aimone, was quoted at length in a recent New York Times article on the 1918 swine flu epidemic. Francesco recently completed his master’s thesis on “The Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918 in New York City.”