Postdoctoral Prize Paper Award

Eligibility

To be eligible, the paper must have been written as part of the applicant’s postdoctoral training in the 3 years leading up to the June meeting. The paper cannot have comprised one of the submitted papers for qualification of the doctoral degree, although related papers prepared subsequent to the awarding of the degree would qualify. The paper can be submitted, accepted, or published at the time of submission; papers published prior to submission should have been published no more than 6 months prior to the award submission deadline.

Requirements

Authors must include two documents:

1. Cover page with their name, telephone number, address and current position, a statement indicating the date the work was completed, their academic post doctoral advisor’s name and signature to certify that the work was completed while the submitter was a post doctoral fellow/trainee, and the name of their department chair or head

2. Manuscript, including a title page without name and affiliation. For under review, in press or already published papers, please submit the version of the paper that was submitted to the journal PRIOR TO PEER REVIEW and before typesetting by the journal. The paper should not contain any identifying information about the journal it was/will be published in.

Award Details

The Lilienfeld Award honors Abraham Lilienfeld, MD, MPH. The award is sponsored by Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the American Journal of Epidemiology (AJE).

The award winner will receive travel funds reimbursement up to the amount of $5,000, and be invited to give a presentation at the Annual Meeting.

Abraham M. Lilienfeld was born in New York City. He received his A.B. in 1941 from the Johns Hopkins University, his M.D. in 1944 from the University of Maryland, and his M.P.H. in 1949 from the Johns Hopkins University School of Hygiene and Public Health. After an internship and residency at West Baltimore General Hospital, Lilienfeld served in the U.S. Army. In 1950, he joined the faculty of the Johns Hopkins University School of Hygiene and Public Health as a lecturer. He earned the rank of assistant professor of epidemiology in 1952. In 1954, he left Johns Hopkins to serve as associate professor of preventive medicine at the University of Buffalo School of Medicine. Lilienfeld returned to Johns Hopkins in 1958 as professor of chronic diseases in the school of hygiene and public health. In 1961, he became professor and chairman of the department of chronic diseases, a position he resigned in 1970 in order to become professor and chairman of the department of epidemiology. He resigned the chairmanship in 1975 but was active as a teacher and scientist until his death in 1984. Lilienfeld was recognized internationally as an expert in cancer research and as a pioneer in developing epidemiological methods for the study of chronic diseases. The library at the Johns Hopkins University School of Hygiene and Public Health is named in his honor.

Previous Award Winners

2025

Eleanor Hayes-Larson
Eleanor Hayes-Larson is an epidemiologist whose research program integrates social, psychiatric, and neuroepidemiology with advanced statistical methods to understand drivers of cognitive decline and dementia incidence and disparities. Her work takes a lifecourse perspective to examine psychosocial determinants of Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias in diverse populations, with an emphasis on groups historically underrepresented in research. A main line of her research seeks to evaluate the impact of traumatic stress across the lifecourse on cognitive decline, dementia, and neuroimaging biomarkers. In addition, she has a line of methodological research, including both statistical simulation studies and empirical data analysis, that focuses on improving statistical tools for causal inference and generalizability of findings in cognitive aging research.

2024

Paul Zivich
Paul is an assistant professor in the Department of Epidemiology at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His interests are in causal inference with potential outcomes and computational aspects of epidemiology. Dr. Zivich’s work has ranged from assessing the performance of estimators through simulation studies to free and open source software (FOSS) to collection of contact network data with electronic sensors to application of causal inference in the context of infectious disease and social epidemiology. His current work focuses on improving HIV research methods and addressing positivity violations.

2023

Giehae Choi

2022

Alina Schnake-Mahl
Alina Schnake-Mahl, ScD, MPH, is an Assistant Research Professor in the Urban Health Collaborative and the Department of Health Policy and Management at Drexel’s Dornsife School of Public Health. She is also of the Policy Core at the Drexel School of Public Health Urban Health Collaborative. She is a social epidemiologist and health services researcher, and her primary research interest is in the social and political determinants of health inequities. Her current work aims to identify the compositional and contextual features of places — including neighborhood factors, social policies, and governance structures — that are associated with health disparities. Her policy work focuses on occupational- and housing-related social policies. She uses a combination of descriptive and causal methods to identify and inform policies and interventions that can mitigate health inequity.
Dr. Schnake-Mahl earned a ScD and MPH in social epidemiology from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Before joining the faculty, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Drexel Urban Health Collaborative, and previously worked in applied population health research and evaluation at Cityblock Health.

2021

Ellicott Matthay
Ellie Matthay is a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Center for Health and Community at the University of California, San Francisco. Dr. Matthay has a PhD in Epidemiology from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MPH in Global Health Metrics and Evaluation from the University of Washington.
Her research focuses on building the evidence base needed to guide national, state, and local policies to prevent violence and related disparities, and on promulgating tools to strengthen causal inferences about the health effects of social factors and policies. Her current work, funded by an NIAAA K99/R00 Award, is on evaluating how local alcohol and cannabis policies may mitigate or exacerbate health disparities by co-locating alcohol and cannabis outlets in disadvantaged neighborhoods and communities of color.

2020

Barbra Dickerman
Barbra Dickerman’s research is focused on using methods in causal inference and machine learning and the vast amount of data available in health care to improve cancer control. Dr. Dickerman teaches clinical data science at the Harvard Medical School and causal inference methodology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, where she is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Epidemiology.

2019

Matthieu Domenech de Celles

2018

Kara Rudolph
Kara Rudolph is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Emergency Medicine, at the University of California, Davis. Dr. Rudolph has a Ph.D. in Epidemiology and Master’s degree in Biostatistics from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health and Society Scholar. Her research interests are in developing and applying causal inference methods to help better understand social and contextual influences on mental health, substance use, and violence in disadvantaged, urban areas of the United States. Her current work, funded by a NIDA K99/R00, is in developing methods to transport mediation effects from one population to another and applying those methods to understand how aspects of the school and peer environments mediate relationships between neighborhood factors and adolescent drug use.

2017

Neal D. Goldstein
Neal D. Goldstein, PhD, MBI is an infectious disease epidemiologist and research fellow at Christiana Care Health System (Newark, DE), and holds an appointment as assistant research professor in the Department of Epidemiology & Biostatistics at Drexel University Dornsife School of Public Health (Philadelphia, PA). His research spans several disciplines including vaccine-preventable diseases, sexual minority health, pediatric infectious diseases, and women’s health surrounding pregnancy. He also possesses a background in biomedical informatics with detailed knowledge of hardware and software in the healthcare domain. Most recently, he has focused on translational epidemiology, or moving from knowledge generation to application and advocacy. He writes a science blog, which is available at www.goldsteinepi.com/blog.

2016

Rose Radin
Rose Radin is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Epidemiology Branch of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, Division of Intramural Population Health Research. She studies the effects of maternal metabolic risk factors and inflammation on fertility and pregnancy outcomes, using data from a clinical trial of preconception low-dose aspirin and live birth. For her dissertation research at Boston University, she examined determinants of time-to-pregnancy in a prospective cohort study of Danish women.

2015

Ashley I. Naimi
Ashley I Naimi is Assistant Professor in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, and Associate Member in Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Occupational Health at McGill University. His research interests include the development and application of analytic methods to assess the effectiveness of potential interventions in experimental and non-experimental data. His current work focuses on potential policy interventions to mitigate and racial disparities in adverse pregnancy outcomes.

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