Shalala Names Jaén Fellow with Public Health Service

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Carlos R. Jaén, M.D., Ph.D., director of the Center for Urban Research in Primary Care in the UB School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, has been chosen a fellow of the Primary Care Policy Fellowship of the U.S. Public Health Service.

The fellowship was established by the U.S Department of Health and Human Resources in 1990 to provide special training annually in policy, legislation, education, research and service to a select group of primary-care professionals. Donna Shalala, Secretary of Health and Human Services, called for nominations from 70 selected national organizations and chose 30 fellows from those nominees.

Jaén, an assistant professor in the UB Department of Family Medicine, was nominated for the fellowship by the North American Primary Care Research Group. Fellowship faculty include senior members of the U.S. Public Health Service and visiting scholars.

Jaén has been active in public-health research since 1985. A researcher on tobacco dependence and disease, he served on the national advisory panel that developed guidelines for clinicians on smoking prevention and cessation. He was one of eight physicians honored by the American Academy of Family Physicians in 1992 for contributions to medicine and public health, and in 1994 received a Cancer Control Career Development Award from the American Cancer Society.

In 1995, he received a $240,000 Generalist Physician Faculty Scholar Award from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to study asthma among the urban poor in Buffalo. He currently is co-director for UB's portion of a $900,000 grant awarded by the American Academy of Family Physicians to a four-university consortium, the Center for the Value of Family Practice, to conduct research in the way primary-care services are delivered and assessed.