Reducing Financial Barriers to Education through Scholarships

Ever since his medical school days at the University of Minnesota in the 1940s, John R. Pfrommer has believed that public health just makes sense.

Pfrommer remembers listening to Hubert Humphrey, then mayor of Minneapolis, talk on the radio about President Harry Truman's ideas for a national health program.

"It seemed eminently sensible," Pfrommer says. So a few years after he finished his medical training--he specialized in preventive medicine--Pfrommer also decided to get a master of public health (M.P.H.) degree.

Pfrommer enjoyed a long and successful career as a flight surgeon and later as an administrator of hospitals in the U.S. Air Force. After traveling throughout the world, he believes he gained a population health perspective that made him a better physician.

Pfrommer feels fortunate that the government paid for all of his education through the U.S. Army and Air Force. Today, he wants to give other students opportunities like he had. To reduce financial barriers to education, he's supporting scholarships at the School of Public Health.

"I feel very strongly that anyone who has the ability and is willing to work hard has the right to be educated," Pfrommer says.

Although he earned his M.P.H. elsewhere, he chose to give back to the University of Minnesota. "I felt I owed the University something for my medical training," he says.

In the past six years, Pfrommer has established three scholarship funds totaling $170,000 in the SPH: the Dr. John Pfrommer Scholarship; the James Pfrommer Memorial Scholarship, in honor of his brother, who was also his best friend; and the Heidi Pfrommer Benson Scholarship, in honor of his daughter.

He contributes annually to each of these funds. And after the University initiated its President's Scholarship Match program, through which the University matches the payout on qualifying scholarship funds worth $25,000 or more, Pfrommer brought two of his three scholarships up to the match level, making an even bigger difference for students.

Pfrommer, who is now retired and living in Lafayette, Indiana, says he enjoys learning about the SPH scholarship recipients he's supporting. Diana Brostow is one of those students. Brostow, who received the Dr. John Pfrommer Scholarship this year, is a first-year student in epidemiology.

After several years in the film industry, Brostow in 2005 started pursuing her interest in nutrition by training in holistic nutrition and volunteering as a nutrition and lifestyle consultant in Vancouver, British Columbia.

"I love the idea of healing with food and learning about how it relates to chronic disease," she says.

Now as a student in the SPH, Brostow has a part-time job collecting data at the school's Nutrition Coordinating Center. She eventually hopes to earn a Ph.D. in nutritional epidemiology. That makes her scholarship even more important, she says.

"It's made a substantial difference for me. I'm very grateful."