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Public health dean finalists to visit campus
By SUE WUETCHER
Reporter Editor
The interim dean of the School of Public Health and Health Professions has emerged as one of five finalists in the search for a new dean of the school.
In addition to Lynn T. Kozlowski, professor and chair of the Department of Health Behavior in the School of Public Health and Health Professions, and interim dean of the school since last September, candidates are Tee Lamont Guidotti, professor and chair of the Department of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, School of Public Health and Health Services, George Washington University; Amid I. Ismail, professor of cariology, restorative sciences and endodontics, School of Dentistry, and professor of epidemiology, University of Michigan; Richard E. Chaisson, professor of medicine, epidemiology and international health, Johns Hopkins University; and Ayman A.E. El-Mohandes, professor and chair of the Department of Prevention and Community Health, School of Public Health and Health Services, George Washington University.
The candidates will visit campus to meet with representative faculty, staff, students, members of the university’s senior leadership team and select individuals from the local health care community. The search committee, chaired by Richard Buchanan, dean of the School of Dental Medicine, also will hold open forums with each candidate to solicit additional feedback from other members of the university community.
Comments about the candidates also may be emailed to PHHP-Dean@buffalo.edu.
Guidotti was on campus on Aug. 5. Ismail will visit on Aug. 12, with an open forum scheduled from 10:20-11:05 a.m. in 146 Diefendorf Hall, South Campus. Kozlowski’s interviews are scheduled for Aug. 19, with an open forum from 10:20-11:05 a.m. in 144 Farber Hall, South Campus. Chaisson will visit on Aug. 20, with the open forum set for 10:25-11:10 a.m. in 111 Kimball Tower, South Campus. El-Mohandes will visit on Aug. 21, with the open forum being held from 10:25-11:10 a.m. in 111 Kimball.
The candidates' CVs are being posted on the search committee’s Web site at least two days prior to their visits.
A GW faculty member since 1999, Guidotti also serves as professor of occupational and environmental medicine and director of the Division of Occupational Medicine and Toxicology at GW’s School of Medicine and Health Sciences. He served as president of the American College of Occupational and Environmental Medicine from 2006-07.
He holds a B.S. in biological sciences from the University of Southern California, an M.P.H. from Johns Hopkins University School of Hygiene and Public Health, and an M.D. from University of California-San Diego.
A prolific scholar with more than 180 publications, Guidotti’s research focuses on occupational and environmental lung disorders, inhalation toxicology, air quality, ecosystem and human health, and the evaluation of scientific evidence for use in the legal and policy arena. He has been particularly involved with the hazards facing firefighters and other first responders, and on issues in the oil and gas industry.
Ismail is director of the program in dental public health in the School of Public Health. Prior to joining the faculty at the University of Michigan in 1997, he was on the faculty at Dalhousie and McGill universities. He has published nearly 100 articles in scholarly journals.
Ismail directs the National Institutes of Health-funded Detroit Center for Research on Oral Health Disparities and the Detroit Oral Cancer Prevention Project.
His current research focuses on determinants of disparities of dental caries in African-American children. He is conducting a clinical trial testing the impact of motivational interviewing on oral hygiene behaviors, as well as on dental caries incidence measured using the International Caries Detection and Assessment System. He also is conducting a community-based multi-media intervention to reduce the mortality from oral cancer in Detroit. Both of these projects are funded by the NIH.
He received a B.D.S. from the University of Baghdad, and M.B.A., M.P.H. and Dr.P.H. degrees, all from the University of Michigan.
Kozlowski joined the faculty of the School of the School of Public Health and Health Professions in 2006 to head the then-new Department of Health Behavior. A leader in the field and international leader in smoking cessation, he previously was a professor and head of biobehavioral health in the College of Health and Human Development at Pennsylvania State University.
His primary interest is smoking and health; he has published more than 100 papers in the field.
Prior to his tenure at Penn State, Kozlowski taught at the University of Toronto for 10 years and was on the staff at 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.
A graduate of Wesleyan University, he holds two master’s degrees and a doctorate from Columbia University.
Chaisson is director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Tuberculosis Research, a multidisciplinary center with more than $60 million in grants. From 1988-1998, he served as director of the Johns Hopkins AIDS Service, and he co-founded the Johns Hopkins HIV Clinic cohort, an observational study that has been the source of more than 130 scientific publications on the outcomes of HIV and its treatment.
Currently principal investigator on 11 research grants, he has published more than 300 scientific papers and book chapters and directs the Consortium to Respond Effectively to the AIDS/TB Epidemic (CREATE), an international research consortium funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to assess the impact of novel strategies for controlling HIV-related TB.
He received B.S. and M.D. degrees from the University of Massachusetts, and was an intern, resident and fellow at the University of California-San Francisco, where he held an appointment as an assistant Professor of Medicine.
El-Mohandes shifted to a career in public health after 20 years as an academic practicing pediatrician. Many of his research and service activities focus on interventions designed to improve maternal and infant health, especially in developing countries and among minority populations in the United States.
As principal investigator on DC H.O.P.E.’s Healthy Outcomes of Pregnancy Education, he helped to evaluate an integrated intervention on smoking and psychosocial risk during pregnancy that involved 1,800 women.
He currently is principal investigator on a $3.5 million National Institute of Child Health and Human Development initiative to reduce smoking among pregnant minority women.
Born and raised in Egypt, he received four degrees from Cairo University: a Bachelor of Arts in premedical science, a Medical Bachelor and Bachelor of Chirurgie, a Master of Science in pediatrics and a Doctor of Medicine in pediatrics. He also earned an M.P.H. in epidemiology/biostatistics from GW.