2018 Alumni Summit

Honors and Awards

If you attended Mailman honors and awards ceremonies in previous years and felt slightly overwhelmed by but proud of the abundance of talent and initiative on display, you would not have been disappointed by the 2018 bumper crop of recipients of two top honors: the Allan Rosenfield Alumni Award for Excellence and the Outstanding Recent Alumni Award. 

M. Monica Sweeney, MD, MPH, FACP was nominated by Dean Linda P. Fried for the Allan Rosenfield Alumni Award for Excellence, named in honor of a former Dean who helped to transform Mailman into one of the leading schools of public health in the United States.  Dr. Sweeney served as vice dean for global engagement and clinical professor and chair of the Department of Health Policy and Management in the School of Public Health at SUNY Downstate Medical Center.  In these positions, Dr. Sweeney provided leadership for the School of Public Health’s many globally-engaged teaching, service, and research activities both locally and internationally.  As former chair of the Department of Health Policy and Management, she led a department whose student enrollment is among the largest in the School’s five Master of Public Health degree tracks.

Prior to this post at SUNY Downstate, Dr. Sweeney served as the Assistant Commissioner for the Bureau of HIV/AIDS Prevention and Control in the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (NYC DOHMH).  Before joining DOHMH, she was the medical director and vice president for medical affairs at the Bedford Stuyvesant Family Health Center in Brooklyn.  As if all that weren’t enough, Dr. Sweeney is the immediate past chair of the SUNY Downstate Council; served on the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS (PACHA); was president of the Medical Society of the County of Kings; served as co-chair of the Physician Advisory Council of the New York State Department of Health AIDS Institute; and served as the president of the Clinical Directors Network. 

Moreover – and don’t try to read all these accolades without taking a breath because you will pass out from lack of oxygen – she is the recipient of numerous awards and honors including the Award for Service in Health & Health Education for Black Women of the Congressional Black Caucus; the Public Health Advocate Award from the Public Health Association of New York City; and the Leadership in Urban Medicine Award of the Arthur Ashe Institute for Urban Health.

Dr. Sweeney received her medical degree from SUNY Downstate College of Medicine and a Master of Public Health degree in health services management from Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health in '92. She completed her residency training in internal medicine at Kings County Hospital Center/Downstate Medical Center and is boarded in internal medicine.

The 2018 recipient of the Outstanding Recent Alumni Award from Mailman is no slouch, either.  James M. Noble, MD, MS ‘O8 is currently an Assistant Professor of Neurology at Columbia University Medical Center who earned a master's degree in epidemiology at the Mailman School of Public Health where he focused on neuro-epidemiology.  For his accomplishments as a Mailman student, he was recognized with the 2008 Anna C. Gelman Award for Excellence in Epidemiology for his master's thesis, later published in the Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry. This work led to an ongoing NIH-funded project studying the oral and cognitive health of 1130 elderly participants in the Washington Heights-Inwood Columbia Aging Project. 

Dr. Noble has a track record of research in neurological disorders from dementia to concussions. In conjunction with Dr. (can you ask Kim for the name of the person who nominated Dr. Noble for the award? – I believe that the person who nominated him is the co-founder of Hip Hop for Health), he developed the NIH-funded, highly innovative intergenerational neurological health literacy programs Old School Hip Hop and Hip Hop Stroke.  These and related programs have reached nearly 100,000 elementary school-aged children in New York City since 2005.  Dr. Noble has also created a substantial portfolio of epidemiological research and clinical care in concussion since 2011. He leads an interdisciplinary group to deliver post- concussion care to pediatric, collegiate (including Columbia and Fordham), and adult amateur and professional athletes in the Tri-State area near CUMC. Ongoing research projects include epidemiologic studies of concussion among current and former Columbia University athletes and secular trends in concussion care in New York.

Since 2013, Dr. Noble has been very active in developing the 22 school collaborative comprising the Big 10-Ivy League Traumatic Brain Injury Consortium.  He is also a member of the New York State Athletic Commission Medical Advisory Board (charged with determining policy for NY professional combat sports including boxing and mixed martial arts) and serves as an independent neurological consultant for the NY Giants, in which capacity he is responsible for determining safe return to play following concussion. Recognizing the major gap of failure to diagnose in more than 2/3 of all cases, he has focused on developing an objective, novel, real-time, on-field concussion diagnostic. This endeavor was supported by the Columbia-Coulter translational program, has been transitioned into a startup company (NoMo Diagnostics), and was featured in Wired magazine online.

Raise your hand if you are intimidated by someone with so many accomplishments.  Okay, that’s all of us.  That said, I’ll add one more: in 2010, he co-founded and now serves in a volunteer capacity as the president of a non-profit organization, Arts & Minds, offering arts-centered museum-based programs for dementia patients and caregivers in New York City.  Arts & Minds is the largest of its kind in the US and the only one in Spanish.  Since 2010, Arts & Minds has delivered over 500 programs (all free) in 5 NYC museums to over 300 dementia patients and their families with over 130 programs delivered in 2017 alone. Ongoing collaborators include the Smithsonian Institution and other museums outside NYC.  Whew.  His family must have run out of room on the refrigerator for posting copies of all of his prizes.

– Nina Rothschild, DrPH ‘00, MPH ‘92