Gaylord Anderson Leadership Award

Joseph Su, MPH ’95 (Public Health Nutrition)

Joseph Su, PhD, MPH, is a Professor of Epidemiology and Inaugural Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at the Peter O’Donnell Jr. School of Public Health at UT Southwestern. He is also a co-director of the Simmons Comprehensive Cancer Center Office of Training and Education. He received his PhD in nutritional epidemiology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and his MPH in public health nutrition at the University of Minnesota. He earned his undergraduate degree in nutritional sciences at the University of Minnesota and training in chemistry at Chung-Yuan University in Taiwan.

Su has spanned his career at both academic medical centers and public service in the federal government. Previously, he served as a Branch Chief at the Division of Epidemiologic Research of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Center for Medical Devices and Radiological Health, where he oversaw all post-approval Class III cardiovascular and neurological devices and in vitro diagnostic devices in the US market. Prior to the FDA, he was a Program Director at the Epidemiology and Genomic Research Program, Division of Cancer Control and Population Sciences, National Cancer Institute (NCI), where he managed a diverse grant portfolio on cancer epidemiologic studies that involved nutrition, environmental exposure, genetics/ epigenetics, application of -omics in population-based studies, and quality of life and survival after cancer diagnosis.

Su is a cancer epidemiologist with expertise in assessing nutritional and environmental exposures and their interactions with genetic and epigenetic factors in cancer development and progression. His research integrates advanced analytical methods to examine how diet, environmental contaminants, and metabolic pathways influence cancer risk and outcomes. He has extensive experience in minority recruitment and follow-up, survey study design, and the application of optical character recognition for data processing and validation. Additionally, his laboratory is equipped with cutting-edge technology for biological sample processing, storage, and analysis, supporting population-based research in genomics, epigenomics, and metabolomics. His current work focuses on understanding the complex relationships between diet, food contaminants, and long-term health outcomes.

Alumni Award of Merit

Maria Medina, MPH ’20 (Public Health Practice)

Maria Medina has dedicated her career and leadership to supporting institutions and companies in better including and serving marginalized communities to achieve equitable outcomes and access to opportunities. She is the System Director for Equity Initiatives for M Health Fairview, Minnesota’s largest healthcare provider and one of the state’s largest employers. Her expertise and experience spans community organizing, business strategy, and application of public health frameworks to tackle racial and health disparities. She has worked with communities and organizations locally, nationally, and internationally, and her heart is in mentoring youth, women, and people of color to grow their leadership capacity.

Beyond her work in healthcare, Medina co-founded La Red Latina de Educacion Temprana, a network of over 400 Spanish speaking family, friend, and neighbor childcare providers working to change Minnesota’s early childhood system to grow healthy and school-ready children. As Minnesota’s first Latina mayor, elected in 2018, she has championed policies supporting affordable housing, multi-modal transportation, climate resilience, and removing barriers to opportunity for youth, women, and people of color to shape a future where equity and justice are priorities across sectors.

Alumni Innovator Award

Joann O’Leary, MPH ’79, MPH ’79 (Maternal and Child Health, Public Health)

Joann O’Leary has a PhD, MPH, MS with experience as a NICU nurse, an infant teacher in a preschool special education program, and as a parent-infant specialist in a high-risk perinatal unit. She worked individually with families and started the pregnancy after loss program with two nurse colleagues, integrating a child developmental prenatal attachment model of care into the medical setting. She is a consultant to the Star Legacy Foundation and has facilitated groups for bereaved parents and grandparents for over 35 years. She earned a Rotary Scholarship at Queens University in Belfast, a Bush Fellowship, and a Fulbright Specialist Award working with colleagues at University College Cork. She continues to collaborate with colleagues in Ireland, Iceland, Poland, and Australia around prenatal loss and the pregnancy that follows.

Her research focuses on perinatal loss following a pregnancy and how that impacts all family members. She has published four books in this area and has spoken nationally and internationally on these topics.

Emerging Leader Award

Carol Nelson, MPH ’18 (Public Health Practice)

Growing up on a small wheat and cattle farm in northwestern North Dakota, Carol Nelson knew the value of access to healthcare. Choosing a career in medicine, she graduated from Concordia College in Moorhead, MN, in 1974 and Washington University School of Medicine in 1978, followed by residencies in internal and family medicine.  Her medical practice focused on women’s health.

Later in her career, while working at Boynton Health, she had the opportunity to become involved in global health. In 2013,  Nelson made her first trip to Africa, which changed the course of her life.  The Rural Health Care Initiative (RHCI), a nonprofit founded by Boynton nurse Alice Karpeh and the Sierra Leone Community in Minnesota in 2011, was developing its programs in the Tikonko Chiefdom of rural Sierra Leone with the mission of reducing maternal and child mortality.

When Nelson became a board member of RHCI, she discovered the need to gain more knowledge about global health, public health, and nonprofit management.  In 2018,  she completed the Executive Program in Public Health Practice at SPH with a focus on global health and nonprofit management. The school provided her with the skills, knowledge, and experience to be an effective leader at RHCI.

Over the past 13 years, Nelson has been part of a team that has built RHCI into a strong organization, making an impact in the low-resource country of Sierra Leone.  This past year, over 35,000 points of impact were documented by RHCI.  The rate of maternal and child mortality has decreased in the Tikonko Chiefdom of Sierra Leone over the past decade, due to the work of RHCI and its in-country team of dedicated staff.

Nelson served in various leadership and volunteer capacities with RHCI, including as a board member, board chair, executive director, and program director. She continues to make annual trips to Sierra Leone and remains active with RHCI to ensure its long-term sustainability.

Outstanding Mentor Award

Lindsay Williams, MPH ’10 (Epidemiology)

Lindsay Williams obtained her BS in biology with a minor in statistics from Iowa State University while working at an animal-focused vaccine lab. She then went on to earn a Master of Public Health in epidemiology from the University of Minnesota while working on environmentally induced cancers under the mentorship of Heather Nelson. After spending two years overseeing tumor tissue and medical records collection for the Southern Community Cohort Study at the International Epidemiology Institute, Williams earned her PhD in epidemiology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, with an emphasis on cancer. Her dissertation focused on risk factors and outcomes in breast cancer by histologic and molecular subtypes. She then completed her postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Minnesota in childhood cancer epidemiology, where she began to study sex differences in childhood leukemia incidence under the mentorship of Jen Poynter, Logan Spector, and Erin Marcotte.

Following her postdoctoral fellowship, Williams became an assistant professor in the Division of Epidemiology and Clinical Research in the University of Minnesota Medical School. There, she expanded her sex differences research in leukemia and she studied sex differences in brain tumor incidence and outcomes in children and young adults by brain tumor histologic and molecular subtypes, among other cancer-focused research topics. She established her Division’s Trainee Professional Development Program to ensure proper professional training outside of courses for students, she lectured in various courses on childhood cancer epidemiology and epidemiologic methods, and mentored students from undergraduate through graduate programs. She now works at Eli Lilly as a Director of Health Economics and Outcomes Research for Oncology.

Mentoring has always been central to her research. Just as she had supportive and impactful mentors over her academic training and career, she seeks to provide that same balanced support to her mentees. The SPH Alumni program, which she was a part of as a student while at SPH, has provided her a great opportunity to mentor students eager to find their path in public health. She believes it is important to guide each mentee to their specific goals by tapping into her network for shadowing experiences and informational interviews, while also challenging students to push themselves. Mentoring is her passion and it truly brings her joy!

Do you know a graduate of the School of Public Health (SPH) who deserves recognition?
The SPH recognizes the outstanding achievements of its alumni through the SPH Alumni Awards and various University honors. Alumni are honored at various stages of their careers. Tell us more by emailing sph-alum@umn.edu about an alum you think deserves to be honored.