NIOSH 2005 Awards Recognize Scientific Excellence, Service, Research to Practice

Contact: Fred Blosser (202) 401-3749

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) presented annual awards on April 28, 2005, to recognize the scientific excellence of technical and instructional materials by NIOSH scientists and engineers, to honor exceptional service by an individual in the occupational safety and health field, and to highlight outstanding efforts by NIOSH scientists and their partners in applying occupational safety and health research to preventing workplace fatalities, illnesses or injuries.

The awards are:

• The Alice Hamilton Award for 2005, which was presented to four NIOSH technical products of superior scientific merit from 2004. NIOSH presents the award each year, on the basis of rigorous reviews by panels of scientific experts, including peers from both outside and inside NIOSH, for outstanding NIOSH contributions in the areas of biological sciences, engineering and physical sciences, human studies, and educational materials. The award is named for Dr. Alice Hamilton, a pioneering researcher and occupational physician. It was first presented by NIOSH in 1988.
• The 2005 James P. Keogh Award for Outstanding Service in Occupational Safety and Health, presented to Dr. Rosemary Sokas, Director of the Division of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Public Health. Before joining the University of Illinois, Dr. Sokas was Lead Medical Officer and then Associate Director for Science in NIOSH. The Keogh Award was first presented by NIOSH in 2000.
• The Bullard-Sherwood Research-to-Practice Award, which was presented to four projects in 2004 for excellence in applying research to occupational illness and injury prevention. The award, which was presented by NIOSH for the first time this year, is named for Edward W. Bullard, who invented the hard hat, and R. Jeremy Sherwood, who invented the personal industrial hygiene sampling pump. The recipients of the award were selected after close reviews for outstanding contributions three categories: knowledge, for research resulting in developing and transferring new knowledge into practice; interventions, for research resulting in interventions put into practice; and technology, for research resulting in new technologies put into practice.

“This year’s selections for the Alice Hamilton Award again demonstrate that NIOSH and its partners are leading world-class scientific research into the prevention of work-related injuries, illnesses, and deaths,” said NIOSH Director John Howard, M.D. “And this year, with the new Bullard-Sherwood Award, we also recognize the excellence of efforts that move the products of such research into everyday application in the workplace.”

Dr. Howard added, “Such efforts are key for stimulating new innovations that may have as dramatic and positive an impact on the 21st Century workplace as the hard hat and the sampling pump had on the 20th Century workplace.”

The list of recipients of the 2005 Alice Hamilton Award can be found at www.cdc.gov/niosh/hamilton/. The list of recipients of the 2005 Bullard-Sherwood Award can be found at www.cdc.gov/niosh/hamilton/bullard-sherwood.html.