The Outstanding Recent Alumni Award
Dr. Betty Chang is an Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine at Columbia University Irving Medical Center (CUIMC), with a joint appointment in the Department of Health Policy and Management at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health. A board-certified Emergency Physician with over 20 years in academic medicine, she brings expertise in clinical care, education, research, and administration. Since joining NewYork-Presbyterian in 2009, she has served as Medical Director of the CUIMC Adult Emergency Department, overseeing an 86-bed unit with over 100,000 annual visits. Under her leadership, the department has prioritized addressing social determinants of health. Her commitment to health equity and clinical excellence has earned her multiple honors, including CUIMC’s Academy of Community and Public Service induction, NewYork-Presbyterian’s Physician of the Year Award (2022), and the Dr. Lorna M. Breen Leadership Award (2024).
Recipients of the Outstanding Recent Alumni Award:
- 2025: Betty C. Chang, MD, MHA’21
- 2024: Sun-Ming Jessica Pan, MPH’19 and Shahbaz Salehi, MD, MPH’15, MSHIA
- 2022: Ashley Gripper, PhD, MPH '17
- 2021: Alison Bateman-House, PhD '14, MPH '07
- 2020: Patricia Schnabel Ruppert, MPH '15, DO, CPE, DABFM, FAAFP
- 2019: Cynthia Cox, MPH '11
- 2018: James M. Noble, MD, MS ’08
- 2017: Benjamin Mason Meier, JD, LLM, PhD (M.Phil.’06 and Ph.D. ’09)
- 2016: Carlos A. Cuevas, MPA ’12, MPH ’12