Inside The Academy:
Profiling Dr. Lawrence W. Green    

Robert J. McDermott, PhD
Inside The Academy, Editor  

In this issue, Inside the Academy profiles the most prolific health education scholar of the past 30 years. Of all the researchers and writers who have contributed to our understanding of health behavior, none has done it more voluminously than Dr. Lawrence Winter Green. Since 1991, Dr. Green has been professor of preventive medicine and health promotion, and Director, Institute of Health Promotion Research, at, the University of British Columbia. Dr. Green received B.S. (1962), M.P.H. (1966), and Dr.P.H. (1968) degrees each in the area of public health or public health education, from the University of California-Berkeley.

Dr. Green is, perhaps, best 'known by health education researchers as one of the developers of the PRECEDE-PROCEED Mode1, which has been used throughout the world to guide health program intervention design, implementation, and evaluation. The continuous evolution of this model demonstrates the interdependence of health education and several social science disciplines. To use his own words: "The newly emerging field of health promotion intersects the bound- aries of the humanities and social sciences with its focus on quality of life, social conditions and behaviour or lifestyle as determinants and consequences of health. This sphere of interdisciplinary study has been my research terrain since completing my undergraduate studies."

Dr. Green's work has led him around the world in the identification of the predisposing, enabling, and reinforcing factors that influence health needs and quality of life concerns. This pursuit has enmeshed him in a series of social diagnostic studies for communities and populations in which the societal structures that enhance or compromise the adoption of healthy lifestyles by individuals have been examined. Such work has, in turn, created the need to expand and adapt experimental and quasi-experimental models of research to fit the social and organizational change processes of schools, workplaces, and other institutional settings. Dr. Green's studies of mass-media and community-organization strategies that facilitate dissemination of innovation and change across persons, places, and times have measured such constructs as adoption of health policies and curricula by schools, adoption of pro- health behaviors in communities following carefully orchestrated mass-media campaigns, and adoption of smoking-control policies in workplaces.

Prior to his tenure at the University of British Columbia, Dr. Green completed 3 years (1988-1991) as the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation's vice president and director of health promotion. During this time, the program was recipient of the Foundation Award of the National Association of Prevention Professionals. Before that assignment, he spent 7 years (1981-1988) at the University of Texas Health Science Center, during which time he was the founding co-director of the CDC-sponsored Southwest Center for Prevention Research, and later, the founding director of the WHO-sponsored Center for Health Promotion Research and Development. From 1979 to 1981, he served during the Carter administration as the first director of the US Office of Health Information, Health Promotion and Physical Fitness and Sports Medicine (now the Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion). Prior to that time (1970- 1979), Dr. Green served in various capacities at the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health, was a Ford Foundation Project Associate in what is now Bangladesh, and was a commissioned officer of the US Public Health Service.

In his many years in academic settings, Dr. Green has mentored more than 50 doctoral students or postdoctoral fellows. He has held more than two dozen appointments as a visiting scholar at universities throughout the globe. The grant and evaluation contract dollars that he has administered as a principal investigator, director, or co-applicant number in the tens of millions. For his cumulative work, he has been cited with the Excellence Award of the American Public Health Association (1994) and the Doyen Jacques Perisot Medal of the International Union for Health Promotion and Education (1991). Some of the many additional awards include the Healthtrac Foundation Health Education Prize (1998), the John P. McGovern Award (1997), the Distinguished Fellow Award of the Society for Public Health Education (1985), the Presidential Citation (1981), Scholar Award (1986), and the Professional Service Award (1989) of the Association for the Advancement of Health Education, the Scholar Award of the American Alliance for Health, Physical Education, Recreation and Dance (1989), and the Distinguished Career Award of the American Public Health Association's Public Health Education and Health Promotion Section (1978).

Dr. Green has authored or coauthored more than 250 chapters, monographs, and articles. Three of his books, including Community Health, Measurement andEvaluation in Health Education and Health Promotion, and Health Promotion Planning: An Educational and Ecological Approach, have been widely adopted, read, and used through multiple editions by more than one generation of scholars. As studies of citation indices have noted before, his written works are among the most cited by health education researchers and practitioners alike. He has been editor or member of the editorial board of more than 30 publications and journals.

Now in his fourth decade of significant contribution to health education and health promotion, Dr. Green continues to provide the cutting-edge leadership in research, teaching, and professional service that has been his trademark. His research contributions bring prestige to all who proudly declare their professional title to be that of "health educator." It is a privilege for the American Academy for Health Behavior to count him among its Fellows and, indeed, a pleasure to acknowledge some of his career achievements.