Excellence in Education Award

The Noel Weiss & Tom Koepsell Award for Excellence in Education is awarded annually to an individual who has made substantial contributions to the field of epidemiology through one or more of mentoring, training, and/or teaching. Previous winners haven’t all made substantial contributions in more than one area, though candidates who have contributed in multiple areas are seen favorably.

Eligibility

Candidates must be a member of SER with at least five years in the role of one or more of mentoring, training, and/or teaching. Impact on the career trajectory of mentees, trainees, or students; quality of mentoring, training, or teaching activities; and strength of nomination and recommendation letters are the core criteria that are used for selection of the annual awardee. Applicants from non-academic institutions that exemplify excellence in training and/or mentoring are eligible for this award.

Requirements

Candidates must be nominated by at least one SER member. Self-nomination will not be accepted. 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 award winner will receive complimentary meeting registration to SER’s Annual meeting, travel funds reimbursement up to the amount of $5,000, and be invited to give a presentation during the professional development sessions at the Annual Meeting.

Noel Weiss

For more than 40 years, Dr. Noel S. Weiss has instructed graduate students at the UW on the core methods of epidemiology.

Tom Koepsell

Dr. Thomas Koepsell has applied epidemiologic research techniques to evaluating health promotion and disease prevention programs.

2025

Daniel Westreich
Dr. Daniel Westreich is a professor of epidemiology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Gillings School of Global Public Health. He received his PhD in epidemiology from UNC-Chapel Hill in 2008.
Substantively, his research investigates the intersection of HIV with reproductive health. This work has elucidated relationships between pregnancy and response to antiretroviral therapy, clarified methodology for studying the potential impact of hormonal contraception on acquisition of HIV. He is currently a PI of the STAR Cohort of reproductive-age HIV-positive and -negative women, and a co-investigator on the MACS-WIHS Combined Cohort Study. He also studies issues related to COVID-19, and the intersection of HIV and chronic disease.

2024

WayWay Hlaing
WayWay M. Hlaing, MBBS, MS, PhD, FACE, is a Professor of epidemiology in the division of Epidemiology and Population Health Sciences in the Department of Public Health Sciences (DPHS) at the Miller School of Medicine (MSOM) with appointment as a faculty affiliate in the Institute for Bioethics and Health Policy.
Dr. Hlaing is an educator, researcher, mentor and the Director of the PhD in Epidemiology program in the DPHS. She currently teaches core epidemiology courses to master’s (MPH/MSPH/MS in Biostatistics and MS in Clinical and Translational Sciences), and doctoral students. She also mentors and leads PhD and MD-PhD students on research, and epidemiology journal club related activities.

2023

Lauren Lindquist
Lauren Christiansen-Lindquist
Dr. Christiansen-Lindquist is an Assistant Professor and Director of Graduate Studies for MPH and MSPH Programs in the Department of Epidemiology at Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health. She teaches epidemiologic methods at the introductory, intermediate, advanced, and doctoral levels, and is well known for her unique pedagogical techniques that make complicated concepts more accessible. She is a co-author of Fundamentals of Epidemiology, a textbook that will be released in Fall 2023. This text includes unique elements inspired by her experience teaching epidemiologic methods to new learners, including addressing common misconceptions and mistakes head-on.

2022

Lauren Wise
Dr. Wise is Professor of Epidemiology at Boston University School of Public Health (BUSPH), where she teaches graduate-level courses on reproductive epidemiology and cohort study design. Her primary research goals are to identify modifiable determinants of subfertility, pregnancy loss, and gynecologic disorders (e.g., uterine fibroids), focusing on populations that are disproportionately affected by these conditions. She is Principal Investigator of Pregnancy Study Online (PRESTO), a NICHD-funded North American web-based preconception cohort study of reproductive health (http://presto.bu.edu). She is also a Co-Principal Investigator of the Study of Environment Lifestyle and Fibroids (SELF), a prospective ultrasound study of 1,693 self-identified Black participants being followed for fibroid incidence during a 10-year period. In this cohort, she examines the role of endocrine-disrupting chemicals and fibroids, and the extent to which environmental contaminants explain the stark racial disparity in this debilitating gynecologic disease.

2021

Whitney Robinson
Whitney R. Robinson is an epidemiologist who specializes in quantitative methodology for studying health inequalities.
Dr. Robinson is an associate professor of epidemiology at the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health, a fellow at the Carolina Population Center, and a member of the Social Epidemiology Program Area and the UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center. Dr. Robinson currently leads an NIH R01 that uses health care and administrative, data to understand causes of racial/ethnic differences in treatment of conditions like fibroids, abnormal uterine bleeding, and endometriosis in the premenopausal period.

2020

Matthew Fox
Matthew Fox, DSc, MPH, is a Professor in the Departments of Epidemiology and Global Health at Boston University. Dr. Fox joined Boston University in 2001. His research interests include treatment outcomes in HIV-treatment programs, infectious disease epidemiology (with specific interests in HIV and pneumonia), and epidemiologic methods. Dr. Fox works on ways to improve retention in HIV-care programs in South Africa from the time of testing HIV-positive through long-term treatment. As part of this work, he is involved in analyses to assess the impact of changes in South Africa’s National Treatment Guidelines for HIV.

2019

Jill Norris
Jill Norris, MPH, PhD, is Professor and Chair of the Department of Epidemiology in the Colorado School of Public Health at the University of Colorado. She received her MPH and PhD from the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health. Dr. Norris’ research has focused on the relationship between diet and other environmental exposures and the development of autoimmune diseases, including type 1 diabetes, celiac disease, rheumatoid arthritis, and lupus, utilizing longitudinal cohort studies in which genetically at-risk individuals are followed for the appearance of autoantibodies and then for the subsequent progression to clinical disease.

2018

Stephen Cole
I work to build accurate and impactful knowledge, particularly population-health (epidemiologic) knowledge. I am a professor of epidemiology at UNC Chapel Hill, and co-director of the Causal Inference Research Laboratory. I am interested in study designs and analyses that best estimate parameters of central interest to population-health scientists, such as risk. These study designs include randomized experiments, pseudoexperiments (i.e., observational studies), and thought-experiments (e.g., simulation studies). I have published nearly 300 scientific papers, and more than 60 of them have 60 or more citations. My mission is to be courageous and kind, to make better decisions (which requires me to learn), and to improve human life (which drives me to teach).

2017

Jay S. Kaufman
Jay S. Kaufman holds a doctorate in epidemiologic science from the University of Michigan (1995). After a post-doctoral position at Loyola Stritch School of Medicine (Chicago, IL) from 1995-1997, he was Medical Epidemiologist at Carolinas Medical Center (Charlotte, NC) from 1997 to 1999. From 1999 through 2008 he held a positions as Assistant and Associate Professor at the University of North Carolina School of Public Health at Chapel Hill and as Faculty Fellow of the Carolina Population Center. In 2009 he began his current position as Professor and Canada Research Chair in Health Disparities in the Department of Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Occupational Health at McGill University (Montreal, Quebec). He is also currently appointed as Visiting Professor in the School of Public Health of the University of Chile. Dr. Kaufman’s work focuses on social epidemiology, analytic methodology, causal inference and on a variety of health outcomes including perinatal outcomes and cardiovascular, psychiatric and infectious diseases. He is an editor at the journal “Epidemiology” and an associate editor at “American Journal of Epidemiology”. With J. Michael Oakes he is the co-editor of the textbook “Methods in Social Epidemiology” (2nd Edition, 2017).

2015

Enrique F. Schisterman
Enrique F. Schisterman, Ph.D., is a senior investigator and chief of the Epidemiology Branch. He earned both his master’s degree in Statistics and his doctorate degree in Epidemiology from the State University of New York, Buffalo. Overall, his research interests focus on epidemiological methods and reproductive epidemiology. He has specific interests in biomarkers and their impact on general health, particularly women’s health (i.e., endometriosis, infertility, and menstrual cycle function).

2014

Susan T. Mayne
Susan T. Mayne is C.-E.A. Winslow Professor of Epidemiology with tenure and Chair, Department of Chronic Disease Epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health. Dr. Mayne is also Associate Director of the Yale Comprehensive Cancer Center, being responsible for Population Sciences, a post she has held for the past 19 years. She also directs a pre-doctoral epidemiology training program at Yale in Partnership with the U.S. National Cancer Institute, to train students in modern methodologies for evaluating lifestyle determinants of human cancer risk, with an emphasis on nutritional, environmental, and occupational determinants, including their interactions with genetic factors. Dr. Mayne is a fellow of the American College of Epidemiology, and of the Executive Leadership in Academic Medicine (ELAM) Program for Women. Her research emphasizes lifestyle determinants of human cancer risk, including diet, obesity, tobacco, alcohol and indoor tanning. She has authored or co-authored over 200 articles/book chapters. She has served on several editorial boards including the Journal of Nutrition; Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers and Prevention; Cancer Prevention Research; Annual Review of Nutrition; and Nature Reviews Clinical Oncology. In addition to her research, she does extensive service including serving on several National Academy of Sciences committees, serving two terms on the U.S. Food and Nutrition Board, and serving a 5-year term on the Board of Scientific Counselors for the U.S. National Cancer Institute. She has received extensive recognition at Yale and nationally for her research, service, and with this award from SER, for her excellence in education, mentoring and training.

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