Boston, Mass., November 5, 2006 --
Jonathan E. Fielding, MD, MBA, MPH, today received the American Public Health Association (APHA)’s oldest and most prestigious award, the Sedgwick Memorial Medal for Distinguished Public Health, at the 134th APHA Annual Meeting & Exposition.
Since 1929, the Sedgwick Medal has been awarded annually to an individual who has demonstrated a distinguished record of service to public health and who has tirelessly worked to advance public health knowledge and practice.
Fielding is a leader in evidence-based practice who has worked for more than 40 years in the public health field. For the past 26 years, he has been a professor in the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) School of Public Health, and for the past seven years, he also has served as director of public health and health officer for the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services.
“In both positions, he has made many contributions to the advancement of public health knowledge and practice,” Southern California Health Association President Kathleen Chamberlin, RN, MS, wrote in a letter nominating Fielding for the award. She said Fielding’s leadership at the county health department “has reinvigorated and improved public health services in one of the most challenging environments in the United States.”
Fielding is chair of the National Task Force on Community Preventive Services and served on the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force. Both those panels have established clear methodologies for review of published evidence and clarifying evidence for effectiveness.
Among his many current appointments, Fielding is a professor in the Department of Pediatrics at Drew University School of Medicine, a member of the Los Angeles County Children and Families First–Proposition 10 Commission and co-director of the Center for Healthier Children, Families and Communities at UCLA.
Among his numerous honors and awards, Fielding was elected to the Institute of Medicine in 1995, was awarded APHA’s Milton and Ruth Roemer Prize for Creative Local Public Health Work in 2003 and received the Distinguished Service Award for Outstanding Service to the American College of Preventive Medicine in 2000.
Under Fielding’s leadership, the Los Angeles health department launched several innovative programs, including a restaurant inspection program that requires businesses to post sanitation inspection results and a chronic disease control program featuring nutrition and physical activity.
He served as acting health officer and senior policy advisor to the director of the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services, co-director of the Center for Health Enhancement Education and Research at UCLA and was the Massachusetts commissioner of public health from 1975–1979. Fielding currently serves as editor of the Annual Review of Public Health and a reviewer for numerous peer-reviewed journals, including the American Journal of Public Health, Journal of the American Medical Association and the Annals of Internal Medicine.