Woodrow Wilson Award 2012

Harry F. Hull, A&S '70, Med '73
Dr. Hull is adjunct professor of infectious disease epidemiology at University of Minnesota School of Public Health, adjunct professor of pediatric infectious diseases at the University of Minnesota Medical School, and president of HF Hull and Associates, a consulting firm focused on infectious disease epidemiology. His international work includes eradicating smallpox in Bangladesh and building immunization programs in Africa. He directed the Global Polio Eradication Initiative at the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva, Switzerland and has served as an Epidemic Intelligence Service officer for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Dr. Hull served as the state epidemiologist for both the New Mexico Department of Health and the Minnesota Department of Health. In those positions, he controlled bubonic plague outbreaks, uncovered a national problem with contaminated body parts used for transplantation, and investigated numerous e. coli and salmonella outbreaks from contaminated food. He also guided Minnesota’s efforts to prepare for bioterrorism and pandemic influenza. Prior to these positions, Dr. Hull served the CDC as consulting medical epidemiologist for Anglophone West Africa in Banjul, The Gambia from 1979-1981. Dr. Hull has lectured on disease eradication in Paris, France; taught a course on vaccines and adverse events associated with vaccination at the NIH in Tokyo, Japan; investigated a polio outbreak in Iran for the WHO; written a proposal for establishing AIDS program for Swaziland, Africa; and done other consulting work in Kuwait, Bangladesh, and all over the world. Top

Devon C. Payne-Struges, SPH '97, '02 (DrPH)
Devon Payne-Sturges is the Assistant Center Director for Human Health with the U.S. EPA’s National Center for Environmental Research (NCER). She is responsible for planning and directing NCER’s $20 million human health research program. Her areas of research include use of exposure biomonitoring for policy analysis, risk assessment, environmental health indicator development, children’s environmental health, and environmental health of minority populations. Prior to her current appointment, Dr. Payne-Sturges was the Environmental Health Scientist and Regulatory Team Leader for the Office of Children’s Health Protection and Environmental Education (OCHPEE) at U.S. EPA, where she worked on critical regulatory and science policy issues at the EPA that have an impact on children’s health. She developed agency strategy to reduce mercury emissions and human exposure to mercury, and she identified chemicals with emerging concerns for children’s health, successfully redesigning the EPA’s rule writer’s guide to consider children’s health in policy making. She has served on several cross-agency workgroups for developing air and drinking water quality standards, making rules to protect farm workers and their families from pesticide exposures, and identifying chemicals with emerging concerns for children’s health. She has also presented briefings on regulatory policy issues for the EPA’s Federal Advisory Committee of outside experts on children’s health, the Children’s Health Protection Advisory Committee (CHPAC). Her work has resulted in the publication of four new fact sheets on environmental tobacco smoke and asthma disparities among African-American and Hispanic children, as well as disparities in lead and pesticide exposures and obesity. Top