The Calderones Prizes and Faculty Awards
Fostering Public Health Expertise and Impact
The Calderone family’s partnership with Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health is a longstanding expression of shared purpose: advancing public health through visionary leadership, scientific excellence, and practical action. Through honors bearing the Calderone name, the family and Columbia Mailman have helped elevate the people, ideas, and institutions that move public health forward—from globally influential leaders, to city health innovators, to rising faculty whose work will shape the field’s future.
The Calderone Prizes
Since 1968, The Frank A. Calderone Prize in Public Health honors the legacy of Dr. Frank A. Calderone, a pioneering public health leader whose career reflected the breadth and ambition of the field. Widely regarded as public health’s most prestigious honors, the Prize recognizes individuals whose work has made a transformative and lasting contribution to population health.
The Calderone City Health Award extends the Calderone tradition by focusing on the vital role of cities in protecting and improving health. It recognizes outstanding municipal leadership and innovative approaches to urban public health—work that often translates evidence into action at the local level, where policy, community partnership, and health equity meet. In doing so, the award underscores that cities are not only sites of public health need, but also engines of public health innovation.
The Calderone Faculty Awards
The Calderone Awards for Junior Faculty Development invests in the next generation of public health leadership at Columbia Mailman. By recognizing promising early-career faculty, the award supports scholars whose research, teaching, and public health practice demonstrate exceptional potential. It reflects the Calderone family’s commitment not only to honoring established achievement, but also to nurturing the ideas and leaders that will define public health in the years ahead.
The Calderone Health Equity Awards support and elevate faculty work that addresses the root causes of health disparities and advances more equitable health outcomes. These awards recognize scholarship, practice, and leadership that confront structural inequities, deepen understanding of the social and environmental conditions that shape health, and generate evidence that can inform policy and action. By investing in faculty whose work centers equity, the awards extend the Calderone legacy into one of the most urgent priorities in public health today.
