A Scientific Symposium Honoring
Robert S. Lawrence, MD
Beyond Tilting at Windmills:
One physician’s remarkable journey in public health
October 6, 2014
1:30 – 5:00 PM
Sheldon Hall, Wolfe Street Building
Hosted by
Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health,
Department of Environmental Health Sciences
Robert S. Lawrence, MD
Director, Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future
Professor of Environmental Health Sciences, Health
Policy, and International Health
Bob is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard
Medical School, and trained in internal medicine
at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.
He served for three years as an officer with the
Epidemic Intelligence Service officer at the Centers
for Disease Control, U.S. Public Health Service.
From 1970 to 1974, Bob was a member of the
faculty of medicine at the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he helped develop a primary health care system
funded by the Office of Economic Opportunity. In 1974, he was appointed as the
first director of the Division of Primary Care at Harvard Medical School where he
subsequently served as the Charles S. Davidson Associate Professor of Medicine
and Chief of Medicine at the Cambridge Hospital until 1991. From 1991 to
1995, he was the director of health sciences at the Rockefeller Foundation.
From 1984 to 1989, Bob chaired the U.S. Preventive Services Task
Force of the Department of Health and Human Services and served on
the successor Preventive Services Task Force from 1990 to 1995.
Bob’s accomplishments include co-founding Physicians for Human Rights (PHR)
in 1986 and taking part in many international investigations of human rights
abuses. PHR shared the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize for its work to eliminate the
use of anti-personnel landmines. Bob is a former chair and emeritus member of
PHR’s board of directors. On behalf of PHR and other human rights groups,
he has participated in human rights investigations in Chile, Czechoslovakia,
Egypt, El Salvador, Guatemala, Kosovo, the Philippines and South Africa.
In 1996, Bob became the founding director of the Johns Hopkins
Center for a Livable Future (CLF). From its modest beginnings to its
burgeoning staff today, the CLF has focused on using the best science
available to illuminate the interrelatedness of agriculture, diet, environment
and public health. The Center combines education and research with
advocacy and outreach. It’s not just a think tank, but a “do tank.”
From 1995 to 2006, Bob served as Associate Dean for Professional Education and
Programs at the School of Public Heath. Since 2006 he has been a full-time faculty
member in the School’s Department of Environmental Health Sciences with joint
appointments in Health Policy and Management and International Health.
Bob and his wife Cynthia have two daughters, three sons and seven grandchildren.
Symposium Schedule
1:30 p.m.
Welcome & Opening Remarks
Michael J. Klag, MD, MPH, Dean
Marsha Wills-Karp, PhD, Chair, Environmental Health Sciences
1:40 – 2:40 p.m.
Session One: The Emergence of Human Rights
as a Framework for Public Health
Hosted by:
Leonard Rubenstein, JD, LLM
Presenters:
Jack Geiger, MD, M Sci Hyg
Race and health, from apartheid medicine to
racial disparities in health in the U.S.
Jennifer Leaning, MD, SMH
A new constituency: health professionals as investigators
and advocates for human rights
Leonard Rubenstein, JD, LLM
The protection of health in conflict as a human rights imperative
2:40 – 3:40 p.m.
Session Two: The Benefits of a Public Health
Perspective in Changing Our Food System
Hosted by:
Kellogg Schwab, PhD
Presenters:
Kellogg Schwab, PhD
Public health impacts from environmental exposure to
industrial food animal production
Lance Price, PhD
Molecular approaches for understanding the origins of antibiotic resistance
Frederick Kirschenmann, PhD
Growing recognition of public health’s role in improving our food system
Schedule continued on next page...
Symposium Schedule (continued)
3:40 – 4:00 p.m.
[ Break ]
4:00 –5:00 p.m.
Reflection & Vision
Hosted by:
Alfred Sommer, MD, MHS
Presenters:
Grace Chan, MD, MPH, PhD
James Yager, PhD
Polly Walker, MD, MPH
The Lawrence family
Robert Lawrence, MD
Alfred Sommer, MD, MHS
5:00 – 6:00 p.m.
Reception in Anna Baetjer Room — W1030
About the Speakers (in order of appearance)
Leonard S. Rubenstein, JD, LLM
Director, Program on Human Rights, Health and Conflict
Center for Public Health and Human Rights,
Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
Before coming to Johns Hopkins in 2009, Mr. Rubenstein was
a Senior Fellow at the United States Institute of Peace, and for
more than a decade before that was Executive Director and
then President of Physicians for Human Rights. He also spent almost 15 years
engaged in mental health advocacy at the Judge David Bazelon Center for Mental
Health Law, including serving as its executive director. His career in human
rights has included investigating the role of health professionals in detention and
interrogation, and the issues of gender-based violence and health in armed conflict.
Jack Geiger, MD, M Sci Hyg
Arthur C. Logan Professor of Community Medicine Emeritus
City University of New York Medical School
Dr. Geiger is a founding member and past president of both
Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) and Physicians for
Social Responsibility. He has led or participated in human
rights missions for PHR, the United Nations, and the American Association for
the Advancement of Science to the former Yugoslavia, Iraq and Kurdistan, the
West Bank and Gaza Strip, and South Africa. Most of his professional career
has been focused on the related issues of health, poverty, and civil rights. Dr.
Geiger initiated the community health center model in the United States.
Jennifer Leaning, MD, SMH
Director, François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human
Rights, Harvard University
Dr. Leaning’s research focuses on issues of public health,
medical ethics, and early warning in response to war and
disaster, human rights and international humanitarian law in
crisis settings, and problems of human security in the context of forced migration
and conflict. She has field experience in problems of public health assessment
and human rights in a range of crisis situations, including Afghanistan, Albania,
Angola, Kosovo, the Middle East, Pakistan, the former Soviet Union, Somalia, the
Chad-Darfur border, and the African Great Lakes area.
Kellogg Schwab, PhD
Professor, Dept. of Environmental Health Sciences,
Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
Director, Johns Hopkins Water Institute
Dr. Schwab’s research focuses on environmental microbiology
and engineering with an emphasis on the fate and transport
of pathogenic microorganisms in water, food and the
environment. The institute he directs integrates Hopkins researchers from across
the university including public health, engineering, arts and sciences, business,
behavior, policy and economic disciplines to address the critical nexus of water,
food and energy. The goal of this program is to achieve sustainable, scalable
solutions for disparate water needs both internationally and domestically.
Lance Price, PhD
Professor, Dept. of Environmental and Occupational Health, George
Washington University
A former Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable FutureLerner Fellow, Dr. Price is pioneering the use of genomic
epidemiology to understand how the misuse of antibiotics in
food animals affects public health. By analyzing the genomes of bacteria found in
humans, food, livestock, and environments near food animal production sites, Dr.
Price and his colleagues have traced new strains of antibiotic-resistant pathogens
to industrial livestock operations. Dr. Price previously served on the faculty of the
Arizona-based non-profit Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen) and
he maintains an appointment there.
Frederick L. Kirschenmann, PhD
President, Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture (N.Y.)
Distinguished Fellow, Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at
Iowa State University
Frederick L. Kirschenmann is a longtime national and
international leader in sustainable agriculture. He manages
his family’s 1,800-acre certified organic farm in North Dakota, where he
developed a diverse crop rotation that has enabled him to farm productively
without synthetic inputs while simultaneously improving the health of the
soil. In 2010, the University Press of Kentucky published a book of his
essays, Cultivating an Ecological Conscience: Essays from a Farmer Philosopher.
He is exploring ways that rural and urban communities can work together
to develop a more resilient, sustainable agriculture and food system. Fred
was recently awarded the One World Award for Lifetime Achievement.
Alfred Sommer, MD, MHS
Dean Emeritus, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
University Distinguished Service Professor of Epidemiology,
Ophthalmology, and International Health
Dr. Sommer was dean of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School
of Public Health from 1990-2005. His long-term research
investigates the cause, magnitude, consequences, and control of vitamin A deficiency
and, most recently, those of related micronutrients. In a series of complex intervention
trials he conducted in Indonesia (1976-1980), his research team discovered that vitamin
A deficiency was far more common than previously recognized, and that even mild
vitamin A deficiency dramatically increases childhood mortality rates, primarily because
this deficiency reduces resistance to infectious diseases such as measles and diarrhea.
Grace Chan, MD, MPH, PhD
Instructor of Pediatrics, Harvard Medical School,
Harvard School of Public Health
Dr. Chan is a graduate of Harvard College, Harvard Medical
School, and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public
Health. She trained in pediatrics in the Boston Combined
Residency Program, then returned to JHSPH to do a PhD with Bob Lawrence
in the Graduate Training Program in Clinical Investigation. During this time,
she was an NIH Clinical Research Scholar and completed a dissertation on
the maternal origins of neonatal infection in Bangladesh. Dr. Chan’s research
activities focus on using epidemiologic methods to advance child health.
James Yager, PhD
Professor, Department of Environmental Health Sciences,
Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
Dr. Yager is an expert on the mechanisms of estrogen
carcinogenesis. His ongoing research is focused on
investigating mechanisms by which endogenous estrogens
and their metabolites and environmental chemicals
with estrogenic activity (xenoestrogens) contribute to the development
of “spontaneous” breast cancer, with the goal of developing strategies for
assessing genetic and environmental risk factors and for prevention. As the
Senior Associate Dean for Academic Affairs from 2000 to 2013, he oversaw
existing programs and developed new academic, training, and continuing
education programs in the Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Polly Walker, MD, MPH
Former Associate Director, Center for a Livable Future,
Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
In 1996, Dr. Walker joined Director Bob Lawrence in
launching the Center for a Livable Future’s involvement
in interdisciplinary collaboration, research, education, and
community outreach – all of which continue to be hallmarks of the Center
today. Dr. Walker has devoted her life to two major interests: health and the
environment. A physician trained in pediatrics, Dr. Walker realized that her
primary interest was in public health. She led several successful land preservation
campaigns in Baltimore County, among other environmental advocacy efforts.