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Honoring A Leader in Public Health

David Axelrod Fellowship recipients

When New York State’s health commissioner, Dr. David Axelrod, suddenly became seriously ill in 1991 and was forced to retire, friends and colleagues felt a need to honor his name and memorialize his outstanding, ground-breaking record as a public servant. People wanted to be able to do something themselves, to make a personal statement of their own.

So to honor Dr. Axelrod, who died of complications from his stroke in 1994, the friends and colleagues set out to strengthen one of his innovations, the fledgling School of Public Health at the University at Albany. They created an endowment in his name to fund an annual fellowship. Their aim: to attract outstanding students to this new-style graduate school blending the academics and research strength of the University with the practical world of the state Department of Health.

Randi Walker, who arrived from California in 1998 with what she describes now as a somewhat naive interest in environmental health issues, has had a powerful scientific experience at the 14-year-old School of Public Health. In fact, through one Department of Health internship, Walker became the Department’s hands-on expert with a brand new database tracking hazardous air pollution, with links to potential cancer risk. She works in the unit preparing a first-ever series of cancer maps, a controversial and tricky scientific problem.

Randi Walker In the department’s Wadsworth Center laboratory, Walker has studied health effects on residents at the Love Canal, the infamous Niagara Falls toxic dump that David Axelrod’s laboratory first investigated and that awakened the world to a new type of environmental problem.

“The best thing the school has going for it is the internships,” says Walker, who has created quite an activist record of her own. She started a student newsletter, revived the Graduate Student Organization chapter and set up special Friday afternoon seminars where students learn practical skills.

“Things aren’t so established here. You can experiment. You say, ‘Hey, we need a newsletter,’ so you start one,” says Walker, who plans on a career in environmental health, either in government or in academia. She chose Albany over Berkeley, Harvard, Boston College and the University of Massachusetts because of the Axelrod Fellowship.

Nova L. Panebianco, the 1999 Axelrod Fellow, is a biology graduate of Binghamton University who sees medical school in her future. She leveraged the fellowship award to support a self-designed health study last summer—in Mongolia. She and a small group of other post-grads designed a study analyzing the way Mongolians use the equivalent of stress as a harbinger of pending illness.

Nova Panebianco “They call stress an illness that has to be treated, instead of brushing it off like Americans,” she says, noting that Mongolians are thereby able to prevent the onset of more serious illness. “If you get sick, you either have to cure yourself or you have to suffer, because there’s no medicine around.”

Panebianco is intrigued by this concept of prevention in a poor culture with so few health care resources, and feels strongly that “there is not enough prevention in our health care system now.”

The first three Axelrod Fellows are also using their Albany experiences to further their careers in public health.

Reester, who earlier took an internship at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, says she met colleagues there from the universities of North Carolina and Michigan, two of the nation’s best known public health schools, and felt that she’d received better training. “We were learning the same thing in class, but I got all the great work experience that they didn’t,” says Reester. “If you are going to be in public health, you have to know how government works, the funding, the organization.” At Albany, she worked with the Albany County Health Department on CHIP enrollment problems, and at DOH on ways to improve and regulate managed care companies.

Reester’s experience highlights one of the core rationales for creating the School of Public Health in the first place, the need to prepare public health leaders of the future with strong training in public service. Dr. Axelrod, a nationally recognized leader during his 12 years as commissioner of Health, was deeply concerned about the future of public health.

This idea was not lost on the people who put together the fellowship program and raised the money. “We thought about funding a scholarship at Harvard, where David went to college on a scholarship himself, and then attended medical school. But this was David’s special creation, and this fellowship can help build the school,” said William C. Hennessy, a longtime friend and fellow cabinet member (he was state Transportation commissioner) who chaired the successful fund-raising committee.

Mainly through individual donations of between $100 and $250, the committee raised nearly $200,000. Contributions came from hundreds of people: fellow cabinet members like Hennessy and heads of major hospitals who often battled with the commissioner, but respected his intellectual vigor and commitment to public service. Less prominent people also gave: Health Department civil servants, secretaries at the Capitol, people all around the state who’d been individually touched by the commissioner’s little-publicized personal warmth and generosity.

The David Axelrod Endowment Fund now generates enough income every year to provide a $12,000 award, and the University waives tuition. This makes it one of the most generous public health school stipends in the country at the master’s level.

The School of Public Health now has a total enrollment of about 300, about one-third of whom are doctoral students. The Axelrod Fellowship is helping to build this new model of public health education.