Outstanding Mid-Career Achievement

The Carol J. Rowland Hogue Award for Outstanding Mid-Career Achievement is awarded annually to recognize a mid-career scientist who has made an exceptional contribution to the practice of epidemiology. This contribution might be a body of work or a singular achievement in epidemiologic research, applications of epidemiology to promote public health, or methodologic advances. Contributions via teaching, mentoring, and service will be secondary considerations. This award is funded by the Department of Epidemiology, Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University in honor of Dr. Carol Hogue.

Eligibility

At the time of the submission open date, a candidate must be an SER member who is a mid-career epidemiologist, defined as 10 or more years and less than 20 years from terminal degree. These limits may be extended by one year for each child of the nominee, for medical leaves, for caregiving for a spouse or parent, or for other similar considerations. Epidemiologists in academia, government and the private sector are eligible. Career accomplishments, evidence of strong trajectory, and promise for continued contributions are core criteria that are used for selection of the annual awardee.

Requirements

– A brief nomination letter from an SER member, including a statement of the nominee’s eligibility and contribution to the practice of epidemiology. The statement of contributions should specify the body of work, or singular achievement, as well as specific details relating to the contribution(s). Secondary criteria may also be addressed. A maximum of two single-spaced pages will be accepted.

– Curriculum Vitae

* Materials should be uploaded in PDF format. Self-nominations will not be accepted.

Once finalists are identified, nominators will be contacted to provide two additional letters of support.

Please note: Multiple nominations do not increase the likelihood of being awarded. In the case of multiple nominations for a single candidate, submitters will be contacted to coordinate a joint nomination.

Award Details

The winner will be awarded $5,000 and be invited to give a scientific presentation at the Annual Meeting.

Carol J. Rowland was born on December 11, 1945, in Springfield, Missouri. In 1966 she earned a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology (minor Psychology) from William Jewell College summa cum laude and married L. Lynn Hogue. She was a social worker in Knoxville, Tennessee, and moved to North Carolina in 1969 where she earned an MPH and PhD in Epidemiology (minor Biostatistics) from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1971 and 1973.

Between 1974 and 1977, Hogue served as Assistant Professor in the Department of Biostatistics at UNC. She then joined the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences faculty, with joint appointments in the National Center for Toxicological Research and the State Health Department, serving as the only epidemiologist in the state at that time. She moved to the Centers for Disease Control in 1982 as an EIS Officer, was promoted to Branch Chief in 1982 and to Division Director in the Reproductive Health Division in 1988. That year she and Lynn adopted Marianna Elizabeth Rowland Hogue (Outerbridge). A leader in the Epidemiology field, Hogue served as President of both the Society for Epidemiologic Research (1988) and the American College of Epidemiology (2003).

Hogue is most widely known for using surveillance systems, developing psychosocial measurement of racial disparities, and conducting groundbreaking epidemiologic studies of perinatal outcomes. At CDC, she developed national linkage of birth and infant death surveillance. Her analyses of this system revealed that high educational attainment was not protective against the racial gap in African American infant deaths and triggered further, ongoing research into discrimination as a risk factor for maternal and infant health. Hogue also led the development of CDC’s Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System (PRAMS) that provides unique data for research, governmental programming, and evaluation. Hogue’s study of the effects of induced abortion on subsequent fertility challenged accepted knowledge from case-control studies, and its methodology continues to be the gold standard to assess long-term health effects of abortion, as evidenced by the 2018 Consensus Report of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, “The Safety and Quality of Abortion Care in the United States.” She served as Lead Epidemiologist for the Stillbirth Collaborative Research Network’s population-based case-control study of stillbirth, with major findings on the scope and causes of this understudied outcome. In 1992 Hogue was appointed to the Jules and Uldeen Terry Chair of Maternal and Child Health at Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health and established the Women’s and Children’s Center. The numerous faculty and graduate students affiliated with the Center have made significant contributions towards understanding preventable causes of racial disparities in women’s and infants’ health outcomes.

2025

David Rehkopf
I am a social epidemiologist and serve as an Associate Professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Population Health and in the Department of Medicine in the Division of Primary Care and Population Health. I joined the faculty at Stanford School of Medicine in 2011.
I am Director of the Stanford Center for Population Health Sciences. In this position, I am committed to making high-value data resources available to researchers across disciplines in order to better enable them to answer their most pressing clinical and population health questions.

My own research is focused on understanding the health implications of the myriad decisions that are made by corporations and governments every day – decisions that profoundly shape the social and economic worlds in which we live and work. While these changes are often invisible to us on a daily basis, these seemingly minor actions and decisions form structural nudges that can create better or worse health at a population level. My work demonstrates the health implications of corporate and governmental decisions that can give the public and policy makers evidence to support new strategies for promoting health and well-being. In all of his work, I have a focus on the implications of these exposures for health inequalities.

Since often policy and programmatic changes can take decades to influence health, my work also includes more basic research in understanding biological signals that may act as early warning signs of systemic disease, in particular accelerated aging. I examine how social and economic policy changes influence a range of early markers of disease and aging, with a particular recent focus on DNA methylation. I am supported by several grants from the National Institute on Aging and the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities to develop new more sensitive ways to understand the health implications of social and economic policy changes.

2024

Jaime Gradus
Jaimie L. Gradus, DMSc, DSc, MPH is a Professor of Epidemiology at Boston University School of Public Health and Psychiatry at Boston University School of Medicine. Her research interests are in the epidemiology of stress and trauma, psychiatric disorders, and suicide. Dr. Gradus has led and been a part of teams that have received numerous grants from the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Department of Defense, and various foundations, which in total have generated over $25 million in grant funding. She has published over 130 scientific articles within the field of psychiatric epidemiology.
Dr. Gradus has roles as a Board Member for the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies, a Scientific Advisor to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, and an Editor of the American Journal of Epidemiology and the Journal of Traumatic Stress. In 2023, she became the Founding Director of the Boston University School of Public Health Center for Trauma and Mental Health. In 2024, she was named Director of the Boston University School of Public Health Epidemiology Doctoral Program.

2023

Shakira Suglia
Dr. Suglia’s research examines the impact of social determinants of health across the lifecourse. She is particularly interested in learning how social factors can affect cardiometabolic health through a stress pathway and whether sociocultural context can modify these associations. Dr. Suglia also leads several studies that seek to understand how social factors affect epigenomic markers that can, in turn, alter cardiometabolic health and other chronic health conditions. Dr. Suglia obtained her MS in Epidemiology from the University at Albany, SUNY and her ScD in Epidemiology and Environmental Health from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. She is a fellow of the American Heart Association and the Academy of Behavioral Medicine Research.

2022

Whitney Robinson
Whitney Robinson specializes in epidemiologic methods for using “big data” to understand racial/ethnic and gender inequities in health and health care. Dr. Robinson is an Associate Professor (pending) in the Obstetrics and Gynecology Department at Duke University School of Medicine. Her current research uses health care system data to figure out why Black women in the U.S. South are treated with hysterectomy at high rates at relatively young ages. In addition, Dr. Robinson has a strong interest in developing novel approaches for using regression-based modeling to understand causes of population-level health inequalities. Other work includes surveillance of SARS-CoV-2 seropositivity in perinatal sentinel populations in North Carolina and under-researched causes of racial/ethnic and gender differences in breast cancer, prostate cancer, and obesity prevalence. Unifying themes of Dr. Robinson’s research are intersectionality, the public health critical race praxis, and life course theory.

2021

Lisa Bodnar
Lisa Bodnar, PhD, RD is Professor of Epidemiology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Public Health, where she has an NIH-funded research program evaluating the role of maternal nutritional status in the health of mothers and children. The first of her two current R01 grants seeks to generate evidence-based recommendations for optimal pregnancy weight gain ranges.
This work stemmed from her participation on the 2009 Institute of Medicine Committee to Reevaluate Gestational Weight Gain Guidelines. Her second R01 aims to use machine learning approaches to inform the Dietary Guidelines for Americans Committee on ideal dietary patterns for pregnant women. Lisa has published over 150 papers. She earned her PhD in nutrition at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Gillings School of Public Health, which recently recognized her achievements with the Outstanding Alumnus Award.
Lisa joined SER in 2002, when she won the Abraham Lilienfeld Student Prize Paper. She loves SER and has formed her most productive collaborations through the annual meeting. During the pandemic, Lisa started the Shiny Epi People podcast, where she interviews epidemiologists about everything except epi. The goal of the show is to humanize public health professionals with a focus on connection, vulnerability, empathy, joy, and laughter.

2020

Katherine Keyes
Katherine M. Keyes is an associate professor of epidemiology at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. Katherine’s research focuses on psychiatric and substance use epidemiology across the lifecourse, including early origins of child and adult health and cross-generational cohort effects on substance use, mental health, and injury outcomes including suicide and overdose. She is particularly interested in methodological challenges in estimating age, period, and cohort effects, as well as using mathematical agent-based and other simulation models to inform public health and policy interventions.
She is the author of more than 250 peer-reviewed publications, and two textbooks published by Oxford University Press: “Epidemiology Matters: A New Introduction to Methodological Foundation”, published in 2014 and “Population Health Science” published in 2016.

2019

Allison Aiello
Dr. Aiello is Professor of Epidemiology at the University of North Carolina Gillings School of Global Public Health and Adjunct Professor of Social Medicine at University of North Carolina School of Medicine. She leads the Social Epidemiology Program in the department of Epidemiology, Directs the Integrating Special Populations Program of the North Carolina Translation and Clinical Sciences Institute, and Co-Directs the Interdisciplinary Training in Life Course Research Program at the Carolina Population Center
Dr. Aiello is a fellow at the Carolina Population Center and an alum of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health and Society Scholars Program. Dr. Aiello’s multidisciplinary and collaborative research has applied approaches from epidemiology, genomics, sociology, and immunology to address complex health questions related to social determinants, infection and chronic disease.

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