UB Physician Wins Coveted Robert Wood Johnson Award

BUFFALO, N.Y -- Carlos Roberto Jaén, Ph.D., M.D., assistant professor of family medicine and social and preventive medicine at the University at Buffalo, is one of 15 people in the United States selected to receive 1995 Generalist Physician Faculty Scholar Awards from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Jaén will use his $240,000 grant to study asthma among the urban poor and identify ways to improve access to health care for the disease.

The awards program is designed to help increase the number of generalist physicians by supporting the teaching and research of promising junior faculty so they can serve as role models for medical students considering careers as generalist physicians. Award recipients also will help develop new initiatives in primary-care education.

As director of the UB Center for Urban Research in Primary Care, Jaén was principal investigator on the first comprehensive health survey of Buffalo's largely Hispanic Lower West Side. In that survey, completed in October 1994, asthma surfaced as one of the major health problems of this poor, inner-city population.

Active in public-health research since 1985, Jaén has published several papers on tobacco dependence and disease prevention in scientific journals. He was one of eight physicians honored by the American Academy of Family Physicians in 1992 for contributions to medicine and public health.

In 1994, he received a two-year, $55,000 Cancer Control Career Development Award for primary-care physicians from the American Cancer Society. He serves on a national advisory panel appointed by the Agency for Health Care Policy and Research to develop guidelines for smoking prevention and cessation.

Jaén holds a doctorate in epidemiology from UB and a medical degree from the UB School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences. He joined the faculty in 1992 after completing a postdoctoral fellowship and residency in family practice at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.

Jaén lives in Snyder.