Honors & Awards
The annual School of Public Health Eugene Feingold Excellence in Diversity Awards celebrate the legacy of public health leader and social activist Dr. Eugene Feingold. Established in 2004, the award recognizes and honors faculty, staff, and students who champion diversity efforts throughout the school, enhance the school’s mission, and contribute positively to the faculty, student, staff, and post-doc environment.
Past Awardees
Kiran Szekeres
Eugene Feingold Excellence in Diversity Award Winner, 2022
In 2022, the SPH staff member awarded with the Eugene Feingold Excellence in Diversity
Award was Kiran Szekeres, director of the Office of Foundational Learning and Practice
in the Department of Health Behavior and Health Education. Szekeres is instrumental
in coordinating events for prospective and admitted students in HBHE, mobilizing faculty
and staff in welcoming and supporting students. She has been a staff member at Michigan
Public Health and in HBHE for more than a decade. Her significant contributions toward
advancing diversity and inclusion in the department and within the school makes her
highly deserving of this award, said Cleopatra Howard Caldwell, HBHE chair. Dr. Caldwell
further remarked that “Ms. Szekeres has consistently taken on her role with excellence
and professionalism, and truly embodies the values of diversity, equity, and inclusion
in making HBHE and Michigan Public Health a welcoming and supportive environment.
Her most significant contribution to our department and school is the help and counseling
she provides to our students to reach their goals and full educational potential no
matter where they are starting from.”
Rachel Morgan
Eugene Feingold Excellence in Diversity Award Winner, 2022
Rachel Morgan, was the student awardee of the 2022 Eugene Feingold Excellence in Diversity
Award. Rachel is a fourth-year doctoral candidate in the Department of Environmental
Health Sciences. Morgan is a leader in creating a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive
spaces within the Department of Environmental Health Sciences and the University of
Michigan School of Public Health and beyond.Her dedication to diversity, equity, and
inclusion (DEI) is expressed in her service on both the departmental and school-wide
DEI committees, and her tremendous efforts to coordinate DEI related activities involving
students, staff, and faculty members. As EHS faculty member Deb Watkins noted, “Rachel
Morgan is a strong, dedicated, and active advocate for diversity, equity, and inclusion
in our department and in our school. We have no doubt that Rachel is poised to continue
to be a leader in the DEI field and in her academic expertise of neurodevelopment
and environmental health sciences. Rachel Morgan is well-deserving of the Eugene Feingold
Excellence in Diversity Award.”
Cleopatra Howard Caldwell
Eugene Feingold Excellence in Diversity Award Winner, 2021
This year, the faculty award recognized Cleopatra Howard Caldwell, professor and chair of Health Behavior and Health Education. Caldwell has long invested
in creating a diverse pipeline of public health professionals. She helped establish
and served as director of the Center for Research on Ethnicity, Culture, and Health,
one of the first research centers in any school of public health to recognize the
importance of the emerging field of racial and social inequalities. And she was director
of the Michigan Future Public Health Leaders Program, which has trained over 350 students
from underrepresented groups and resulted in dozens of participants being admitted
into our graduate programs.
Brandon Bond
Eugene Feingold Excellence in Diversity Award Winner, 2021
Brandon Bond, a dual-degree master’s student in Health Behavior and Health Education and Social
Work, received the student award. Bond is president of the Public Health Student Association,
where he led the creation of events to bring people together and support student mental
health. He proposed to school leadership the idea of Your Home Base, a formal system
of connecting students across departments in small cohorts at a time when connection
was difficult due to the pandemic. Bond has collaborated with the school to develop
new-student supports and academic success workshops, volunteers as an Admissions Ambassador,
serves as a member of several committees and programs at the school and university
that promote DEI, and is a PHSAD Alumni Scholar.
Read more about Bond in First Generation College Graduate’s Ambitions Are Sky High.
Jackie Cormany
Eugene Feingold Excellence in Diversity Award Winner, 2020
Jackie Cormany, graduate program coordinator in the Health Behavior and Health Education
department, received the staff Feingold Award for her commitment to diversity, equity,
and inclusion over the last 23 years of service to the school. Cormany is known by
students, staff, and faculty as someone who creates an environment where all students
can thrive. Welcoming environments, says Cormany, are "better for all of us and better
for public health. We are all working together to keep people healthier. That can
start with letting people know they belong here." Cormany's approach to working with
students focuses on listening carefully and trying to understand each student's journey.
She lets students know that office doors across the department are open and invites
constructive feedback as a key to successfully negotiation challenges and changes
in the school. Cormany has led initiatives that created new student support resources
for emergency situations, internship experiences, and professional development and
has worked with the Development and Alumni Engagement team to build scholarships for
incoming and continuing students. Read more about Cormany's commitment to our students
in You Belong Here: Creating an Environment Where Everyone Thrives.
Anthony Su
Eugene Feingold Excellence in Diversity Award Winner, 2020
Anthony Su, PhD '20, a recent graduate from the Environmental Health Sciences department's
toxicology program, received the student Feingold Award for his passion and tireless
dedication to diversity, equity, and inclusion, especially his work in creating a
more diverse space within EHS. Su serves on both the school-wide and the EHS departmental
diversity, equity, and inclusion committees and said it is rewarding to serve on these
committees "because the culture in both the EHS department and the entire school embodies
well the university’s culture code, which promotes an environment of connection and
understanding—and therefore of productivity—for all." Su is a leader in developing
and using communication and emotional intelligence skills to support conflict management
across the school community. These skills are not only important to supporting more
constructive interactions on campus but help everyone involved build better communication
skills as public health professionals. Read more about Su's leadership and vision
in Safe and Hospitable: The Human Environments that Make the World a Better Place to
Learn, Work, and Live.
By championing diversity efforts throughout the school, the Feingold Award aims to ensure and further develop an environment of inclusion and justice at the University of Michigan.
Ebbin Dotson
Eugene Feingold Excellence in Diversity Award Winner, 2019
Ebbin Dotson, Assistant Professor of Health Management and Policy, was awarded the Feingold Award
for his work on the University of Michigan Summer Enrichment Program (UMSEP), the
Health Equity Leadership Pipeline Collaborative (the Collaborative), and his tireless
commitment to supporting people of color in health care leadership roles through research
and mentoring. The UMSEP is a national model for health professions pipeline programs
focused on identifying and supporting talented students to become leaders in health
care. The Collaborative employs a network of practitioners, consultants, researchers,
and students to study health equity issues, primarily the prevalence of people of
color in health care leadership roles. Dotson is known for continuing to mentor and
support his students after they graduate and enter the fields of health care and public
health. He serves as faculty advisor for student organizations and case competitions
and organizes extracurricular consulting projects for students seeking experiential
learning opportunities as they prepare for internships and job searches.
Cindy Le
Eugene Feingold Excellence in Diversity Award Winner, 2019
Cindy Le, a master’s student in Health Behavior and Health Education (HBHE) and a
Marvin and Harriet Selin Scholar, was awarded the Feingold Award for her work as a
courageous and collegial community organizer, especially her work as a member of the
Health Behavior and Health Education DEI Student Action committee. This year, the
committee hosted Table Talk, a community-based, idea-generating workshop for students
to establish a DEI agenda for HBHE. And to increase transparency and communication
across the HBHE department, the committee created DEI DidYaKnow, a weekly newsletter that provides students information about DEI activities and
issues inside and outside the classroom that concern them. “I am truly honored to
be recognized as the student recipient of the Feingold Award for my work on the committee.
Working toward diversity, equity, and inclusion can be a long and tiring battle, but
it is worth it. This award is recognition that I and the committee are making an effort
and are seen,” said Le.
Arline T. Geronimus
Harold R. Johnson Diversity Service Award Winner, 2016
Arline T. Geronimus, research professor in the Population Studies Center, Institute for Social Research,
and professor of health behavior and health education in the School of Public Health, is known for having proposed and tested the "weathering
hypothesis." It posits that the impact of repeated exposure to and high-effort coping
with stressors by U.S. racial and ethnic minorities leads to early onset of chronic
disease and early biological aging, compared to U.S. whites of the same chronological
age.
Her work advances a perspective that population health disparities arise from the qualitatively different life experiences, exposure to stressors, and access to coping resources associated with specific social identity groups in an unequal society.
She is credited for increasing the number of minority doctoral students in the Department of Health Behavior and Health Education at SPH. She also supervised a disproportionate share of their doctoral dissertations. Geronimus also supported their efforts to win postdoctoral fellowships and faculty positions, while maintaining high academic standards.
"Geronimus has repeatedly demonstrated intellectual excellence and commitment to cultural diversity in all aspects of her work — service, teaching, mentoring and scholarship — has helped increase diversity within her academic units and the university, has solidified a commitment to diversity as part of the university's educational mission, and has relentlessly strived to bring about equity in society,'" wrote Jeffrey Morenoff, director of the Population Studies Center.
Past Eugene Feingold Excellence in Diversity Award Winners
- 2018: Jenny Crawford, Health Behavior & Health Education
- 2018: Katrina Burns, Environmental Health Sciences
- 2017: Marie O’Neill, Environmental Health Sciences and Epidemiology
- 2016: Laura Jadwin-Cakmak, Health Behavior & Health Education
- 2015: Siobán Harlow, Epidemiology
- 2014: Lynda Fuerstnau, Health Behavior & Health Education
- 2013: Amy Schulz, Health Behavior & Health Education
- 2012: Dana Thomas, Office of Public Health Practice
- 2011: Toby Citrin, adjunct professor of health management and policy and director of the Center for Public Health and Community Genomics
- 2010: Barbara Israel, Health Behavior and Health Education, who works in community-based participatory research, empowerment, and social determinants of health.
- 2007: Richard Lichtenstein, Health Management & Policy; co-PI of the Detroit Community-Academic Urban Research Center
- 2007: Harold "Woody" Neighbors, Health Behavior and Health Education; director of Center for Research on Ethnicity, Culture and Health and director of the Program for Research on Black Americans