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2000 Research Laureate Medallion Award
First, a toast to the American Academy of Health Behavior, a society of researchers and scholars in health behavior, health education, and health promotion, for The Academy is now a reality. Thank you all for contributing to that success. In the late 1960s, Stanley Milgram wanted to map the network of invisible threads that connect apparent strangers, so he gave 160 people in Omaha a packet with the name and address of a man in suburban Boston. He asked them to mail the packet to someone they knew who might be able to get the packet closer to its destination. Each of those next people was asked to do the same thing, sending the packet along with the same instructions. To the surprise of everyone in the study, it seldom took more than 6 steps for the packet to reach the man to whom it was addressed. Hence, Milgram introduced the concept of "6 degrees of separation." The more surprising phenomenon was that the packets reached their destination by just 3 persons. This bit of additional information lead Milgram to conclude that 6 degrees of separation does not mean that everyone is linked to everyone else in just 6 steps. It means that a very small number of people are linked to everyone else in just a few steps, and the rest of us are linked to the world through a special few. Of all the health education researchers and writers who have contributed to our understanding of health behavior, none have done it more voluminously than our special person in health education, Dr Lawrence W Green has. No one person in health education is more widely read or quoted than our first American Academy of Health Behavior Research Laureate honoree, Dr Lawrence W Green. Unequivocally, he has contributed more widely to health education than any other person, past or present. Therefore, I suggest that the special person that Milgram referred to in health education research that we are all linked to is Lawrence W Green. Moreover, I propose the concept of not 6 but "1 degree separation from Lawrence W Green for all health educators are linked professionally to Dr Green." For it is Dr Green who gave health education, direction, and respect and who introduced research to the profession. Dr Green received his BS degree in 1962, MPH degree in 1966, and DrPH degree in 1968 in public health or public health education, all from the University of California-Berkeley. From 1991 to 1999, Dr Green was professor of preventive medicine and health promotion and Director of the Institute of Health Promotion Research at the University of British Columbia. In August of 1999, Dr Green returned to the United States and currently is a Distinguished Fellow and Visiting Scientist in the Office of Smoking and Health at the CDC. Dr Green is, perhaps, best known by health education researchers as the original developer of the PRECEDE Model of health education planning and evaluation, and with Marshal Kreuter, the extension to health promotion with the PROCEED Model. In some 850 published and thousands of unpublished applications, PRECEDE and/or PROCEED 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. Prior to his tenure at the University of British Columbia, Dr Green was the Henry J Kaiser Family Foundation's vice president and director of health promotion. Before that assignment, he spent 7 years (1981-1988) at the University of Texas Health Science Center, and was the founding codirector of the CDC-sponsored Southwest Center for Prevention Research, and later, the founding director of the WHO-collaborating Center for Health Promotion Research and Development. During the Carter administration, he served 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). He was then visiting lecturer at the Harvard Schools of Medicine and Public Health. He advanced from assistant professor to professor and assistant dean at Johns Hopkins from 1970-1979, and was lecturer and Coordinator of Doctoral Studies in health education at UC Berkeley, before that, spending 2 years in Bangladesh. Dr Green has mentored more than 50 doctoral students or postdoctoral fellows, some of whom hold division director positions at NIH and CDC, and professorships at Johns Hopkins, Harvard, Duke, UCLA, UNC Chapel Hill, and the universities of Washington, Vermont, Maryland, Texas, and Georgia. He has held more than two dozen appointments as a visiting scholar at universities throughout the globe. He has received tens of millions of dollars in grants and contracts as a PI, director, or co-applicant. He has received multiple distinguished scholars and research awards, and has authored or co-authored more 250 chapters, monographs, and articles. His books, including Community Health, Measurement and Evaluation in Health Education and Health Promotion, and Health Promotion Planning: An Educational and Ecological Approach, have been widely adopted, read, and used thorough multiple additions by more than one generation of scholars. 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. 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." Dr Green has garnished respect around the world the old-fashioned way, "critical thinking and research." It
is a privilege for me to first introduce the concept of "1
degree of separation from Larry Green" into our lexicon, for
health education research began with Lawrence W Green. If health
education were a religion, Dr Green's work would be its cathedral.
It is also a privilege for me to present the first American Academy
of Health Behavior Research Laureate Medallion to Dr Lawrence W
Green. |