The 2021 John Lindenbaum Memorial Lecture and the Columbia Science and Health Equity Lecture Series welcomed John A. Rich, MD, MPH
, last week for a Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons Department of Medicine Special Grand Rounds Lecture on approaches to healing the wounds of violence and racial trauma.
Rich is a professor of health management and policy at the Center for Nonviolence and Social Justice within the Dornsife School of Public Health at Drexel University in Philadelphia. He is a longtime leader in public health whose work focuses on serving young Black men in urban settings.
In 2006, Rich was granted a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship for his work. In awarding the distinction, the Foundation cited his work on designing “new models of health care that stretch across the boundaries of public health, education, social service, and justice systems to engage young men in caring for themselves and their peers.”
Columbia University Irving Medical Center
An April 8 virtual town hall hosted by CUIMC and NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital brought together community health workers and local leaders for another discussion regarding the COVID-19 vaccines.
Keynote speaker was Judith Absalon, MD, MPH’02, a senior medical director of vaccine clinical research and development at Pfizer, where she is a core clinical team member of the COVID-19 vaccine development program. She completed her internal medicine residency, adult infectious diseases fellowship, and master’s in public health at Columbia University.
Judith Absalon
“It’s like coming back home! I spent quite a long time at Columbia,” she said of the opportunity to speak at one of her alma maters. During her presentation, Absalon offered an inside look at the SARS-CoV-2 virus and its corresponding vaccines and answered questions regarding the vaccines’ safety and overall efficacy. Vaccine hesitancy, mistrust, and the virus’s disprop