2007 Award Recipient

Past Award Recipients

 

Thomas Becker, MD is honored for his exceptional dedication in educating future prevention and public health practitioners.

 

The F. Marian Bishop Outstanding Educator of the Year Award is presented to teachers who have displayed excellence in the instruction of students or residents in the field of public health and prevention.

Dr. Becker received his undergraduate degree in psychology at Ohio University, his Masters and PhD in Anthropology at University of New Mexico, and his MD from Case Western Reserve University. His first residency was in Internal Medicine at University of Washington, and his second residency was in Preventive Medicine at CDC. His fellowship with the EIS program in Atlanta was based in the Sexually Transmitted Disease Division with Drs. Russ Alexander and Ward Cates. While at CDC, Dr. Becker was encouraged to develop a new research trust focused on viral carcinogenesis and cervical neoplasia and was very successful in this endeavor.

 

After his public health fellowship, Tom started his academic career at the University of New Mexico, where he conducted multiple studies on diverse topics among Hispanics and American Indian peoples of the State. He developed a very successful grant-funded research program centered on HPV infections and other risk factors for pre-invasive lesions of the cervix--a major public health issue among minority women of that state. Over the nine years of his Assistant and Associate Professorships there, he generated multiple millions of dollars in grants and numerous publication on cervical neoplasia. Much of that research informed the vaccine development and testing efforts currently underway in New Mexico and other sites. At UNM, he also taught epidemiology and public health to medical students and MPH students, as well as teaching on the wards and in the clinics.

 

Tom went to the University of Washington School of Public Health and Community Medicine in 1995, and there took on a more active role as a teacher in the medical school and in the graduate School of Public Health. He radically revised two public health-related courses that he was responsible for teaching, and developed new curricular materials for a grant-funded cancer control research training course for American Indians, Alaska Natives, and Native Hawaiians. He was recruited to Oregon Health and Science University in 1997, where he continued his role as a teacher of public health and as director of Epidemiology and Biostatistics track in the Oregon MPH. He extended his research into the 43 federally-recognized tribes in the three Pacific NW states, focusing on cancer, epidemiology, prevention of childhood obesity and tooth decay, prevention of premature vision and hearing loss, and on other activities related to identification of the prevalence of chronic disease risk factors among tribal people. During his tenure as Department Chair for Public Health and Preventive Medicine, he has tripled the size of the curricula, made major changes in the Preventive Medicine Residency, Directed the Center for Biostatistics, also led the efforts in his department's winning of the ATPM (now APTR) Outstanding Educational Program of the Year Award in 2004. He has mentored multiple public health students, medical students, faculty, and fellow, in addition to 130 Native trainees in his cancer control programs.

 

 

 

^top