CPC Fellow Amy Herring receives APHA’s Mortimer Spiegelman Award
Professor Amy H. Herring accepted the Mortimer Spiegelman Award from the American Public Health Association’s Statistics Section on Tuesday, Oct. 30th at the organization’s Annual Meeting. The award honors her outstanding achievements as a public health biostatistician under age 40.
Herring is an accomplished teacher, researcher, and published author. She is a professor and associate chair of biostatistics at the Gillings School of Global Public Health at UNC-Chapel Hill. She is an elected Faculty Fellow at UNC’s Carolina Population Center, where she conducts research using new statistical methods and innovative applications of statistics in public health and medicine. Her long-standing research interests include environmental health science, reproductive epidemiology, maternal and child health, neonatology, and nutrition and obesity.
Herring received her Sc.D. in Biostatistics from Harvard University. She has authored more than 130 publications, received two teaching awards at UNC, and worked with more than 70 students. She has been a principal investigator (PI) or co-PI of 35 research grants with $67 million in funding.
Her current research at the Carolina Population Center includes these NIH-funded projects:
- Emergence of cardiometabolic risk across the lifecycle in China using data from the China Health and Nutrition Survey.
- Heterogeneity in cardiometabolic risk with obesity: Who is at risk? using data from the China Health and Nutrition Survey.
- Sexual behavior trajectories from adolescence to adulthood using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health.
“Collaborating with CPC Fellows on the Pregnancy, Infection, and Nutrition Study (PIN) really helped me grow my statistical skills. I’ll always be grateful to David Savitz for bringing me onto the team and introducing me to wonderful long-time CPC research partners like Nancy Dole, Anna Maria Siega-Riz, John Thorp, and Andy Olshan, in addition to colleagues Diane Kaczor, Jim Terry, Chyrise Bradley, and Tom Swasey. Through our joint work on the PIN Study they taught me how to work in a collaborative team.”
The Spiegelman Award is named for Mortimer Spiegelman (1901-1969) who was a demographer, actuary, and biostatistician. He was a pioneer in life table development.
The Encyclopedia of Biostatistics’ biography of Spiegelman says “His major contribution to the field of public health and epidemiology came toward the end of his career when he conceived of, coordinated, edited, and carried to a successful conclusion the publication of a series of monographs sponsored by the American Public Health Association (APHA) and published by the Harvard University Press. Each monograph pertained to a specific set of diseases in which the 1960 Census was used in a standard way as the denominator for rates of disease.”
Abstracts of many of Herring’s publications are in PubMed and in REACHNC. APHA’s Annual Meeting was held in San Francisco.
Learn more about the Spiegelman Award on APHA’s website.