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Kozlowski chairs new unit in public health school
By LOIS BAKER
Contributing Editor
The School of Public Health and Health Professions has established a Department of Health Behavior and recruited a leader in the field to chair it.
Lynn T. Kozlowski, formerly professor and head of biobehavioral health in the College of Health and Human Development at Pennsylvania State University, assumed the post on Sept. 1. Maurizio Trevisan, dean of the School of Public Health and Health Professions, said Kozlowski's hiring represents a major advance toward full accreditation for the public health school.
"An international leader in smoking cessation, he grew his former department at Penn State into one of the best in the country," Trevisan said. "He will be a major asset to the university and the school, and we're very excited to have him join our faculty.
"I look forward to working with Lynn as he develops the Department of Health Behavior here at UB, which will play a major role in our becoming a fully accredited school of public health."
Kozlowski's primary interest is smoking and health. He has published more than 100 papers in the field, and research in that area will be a major component of the new UB department.
"Given the experts already at the Roswell Park Cancer Institute, Buffalo will be one of the strongest places in North America for tobacco research and the study of public policy issues on tobacco use," Kozlowski said.
The UB Department of Health Behavior will offer curricula leading to M.P.H., M.S. and Ph.D. degrees. "In five years, we plan to be one of the top graduate programs in health behavior in the U.S.," he added.
A graduate of Wesleyan University, Kozlowski holds two master's degrees and a doctorate, the latter conferred in 1975, from Columbia University. While at Columbia, he held a two-year National Science Foundation traineeship and a two-year New York State Herbert Lehman Fellowship.
He also spent a year at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine on a National Institute of Alcoholism and Alcohol Abuse postdoctoral traineeship.
Prior to his tenure at Penn State, Kozlowski taught at the University of Toronto for 10 years and was on the staff of the Addiction Research Foundation in Toronto for 11 years. He was head of the foundation's Biobehavioral Research on Tobacco Use unit when he joined Penn State's biobehavioral health faculty in 1990. He was named head of the department in 1993.
Kozlowski has served on the editorial boards of several scientific journals and is a fellow of the Academy of Behavioral Medicine Research. In 2003, he won the Pauline Schmitt Russell Distinguished Research Career Award from the College of Health and Human Development at Penn State.
Kozlowski currently is recruiting faculty in the areas of physical activity/nutrition and health communication, and expects to recruit additional faculty next year.
Gary A. Giovino, former director of the Tobacco Control Research Program at Roswell Park and an associate professor in UB's Roswell Park Division, already has joined the new department as a full professor.
A graduate of the University of Notre Dame, Giovino holds a master's degree in natural sciences epidemiology and a doctorate in experimental pathology epidemiology, both from UB.
Before joining Roswell Park, he spent 11 years as an epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Office on Smoking and Health, serving as chief of the office's Epidemiology Branch for seven of those years. He also has held positions at the University of Rochester and the New York State Department of Health in Buffalo.