SPH Faculty Awarded for Career Excellence

SPH professor Mary Story has been named to the Academy for Excellence in Health Research. The academy serves as the highest recognition of research among faculty of the University of Minnesota Academic Health Center (AHC).

Story is an internationally noted authority on obesity prevention and adolescent nutrition. She is principal investigator for numerous studies in this area, among them a five-year $16 million Robert Wood Johnson Foundation initiative called Healthy Eating Research.

She is one of the founding directors of the University of Minnesota Obesity Prevention Center, which includes 55 University faculty, spanning 26 different schools and colleges, as well as several community partners.

Since 2005, she has served on the Institute of Medicine’s Food and Nutrition Board, where she helps to set nutrition standards for food in schools.

SPH professor Deborah Swackhamer has received the Harvey G. Rogers Environmental Health Leadership Award from the Minnesota Public Health Association. Swackhamer’s research concerns compounds like PCBs, dioxins, and pesticides.

She has studied how these agents affect the Great Lakes and their coastal zones. She is co-director of the University of Minnesota Water Resources Center and interim director of the Institute on the Environment, the University’s most comprehensive and ambitious environmentally focused endeavor to date.

At the institute, Swackhamer will head a new 50-year conservation plan for the State of Minnesota, funded by the Legislative-Citizen Commission on Minnesota Resources. Governor Tim Pawlenty also recently appointed Swackhamer to serve on the Clean Water Council.