Member Highlights

Dr. Arthur Michalek is the chapter's 2023 Honorary Delta Omega inductee, recognized for establishing public health programs throughout Western New York that have been training the workforce for decades. Art’s involvement with the School of Public Health and Health Professions predates its very existence. In the early 1990s, with the support of UB President Greiner, he negotiated an affiliation with the University at Albany School of Public Health to establish a branch here in Buffalo for the benefit of clinical trainees. Work soon began on the development of the school. In addition to breaking public health ground at UB, he spent over three decades at the Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center where he was best known for his administrative skills, retiring as a senior vice president and dean of the UB Graduate Division.

Throughout his career Art maintained an active interest in research oriented towards public health. He has published numerous articles on cancer issues affecting Native American communities, worked on a number of specific projects with different tribal groups and was a founding member of several national and international task forces. He also led the Ukrainian component of a three-country study investigating the impact of the Chernobyl nuclear power accident and risk of acute leukemias. Art has served as an advisor/mentor in several international training programs in Nigeria, Sudan, Egypt and Oman. He has also been a Fulbright Specialist in Poland teaching at Wroclaw Medical School. Throughout his administrative and research activities he was an active mentor to numerous master’s and doctoral students who have gone on to highly successful careers.

Upon his retirement he continued to be active in the academic community, leading public health training efforts throughout Western New York to prepare the next generation of public health professionals. Most recently he helped develop the Health Services program in the school and is currently a mentor in the MPH Culminating Project course. He is also an active board member of the Patrick P. Lee foundation where he is currently treasurer and co-chair of the Grants Committee. The School of Public Health and Health Professions thanks Art for his many contributions to building today’s public health workforce and for his continued efforts training tomorrow’s public health professionals.

Jo. L. Freudenheim, PhD, SUNY Distinguished Professor of Epidemiology and Environmental Health, is the 2020 recipient of the Abraham Lilienfeld Award from the American Public Health Association’s Epidemiology Section.

The award recognizes excellence in the teaching of epidemiology during the course of a career.

Congratulations, Dr. Jessica Kruger, Clinical Assistant Professor at the University at Buffalo School of Public Health and Health Professions, Department of Community Health and Health Behavior, and fellow Gamma Lambda member. Dr. Kruger received an honorable mention for the 2020 Delta Omega Award for Innovative Public Health Curriculum. Dr. Kruger, along with her colleague Dr. Sarahmona Przybyla, developed PUB 450 Incarceration and Public Health, a course which examines incarceration in the U.S. from a public health lens. The course focuses on the system of incarceration, social and behavioral factors that contribute to incarceration, health problems that affect prisoners, the role that racial inequality plays in criminal justice, and community re-entry.

Maurizio Trevisan, MD, MS, SPHHP’s founding dean and research professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Environmental Health, recently co-authored an editorial for the American Journal of Public Health on Vietnam’s success dealing with COVID-19. The editorial asserts that Vietnam’s experience “points to the fact that even a low-cost approach based on close monitoring, identification, and isolation can be successful, if implemented quickly and with resolution.” It also outlines the specific steps the country took to cope with the pandemic. Renowned as a cardiovascular disease epidemiologist, Trevisan is currently dean of health sciences at VinUniversity, Hanoi, Vietnam. He served as dean of SPHHP in from 2004 to 2007 and is a member of SPHHP’s Delta Omega Honorary Society Gamma Lambda Chapter.