By Maria Saporta
Dr. Mark Rosenberg, president and CEO of the Task Force for Global Health, is being honored by Research!America, for his ground-breaking research in advancing injury prevention and road safety. Rosenberg will receive the 2013 Raymond and Beverly Sackler Award for Sustained National Leadership for reframing the concept that road traffic crashes are not accidents.
The award will be presented to Rosenberg at the 17th annual Research!America Advocacy Awards at the Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium in Washington, D.C. on March 13. The dinner attracts more than 400 leaders from government, industry, academia and health advocacy organizations to recognize top medical and health research advocates, who have made an impact in advancing the nation’s commitment toward research.
“Dr. Rosenberg has been a champion of public health issues and provided incredible leadership in advocating for increased funding for research,” said Mary Woolley, president and CEO of Research!America, in a release.
The Decatur-based Task Force is a nonprofit public health organization that works to improve the lives and health of millions of people around the world.
“Advocating for global health research is always exciting because there is always an ‘ah-ha’ moment when people come to understand the problem, identify with those who suffer from it, and become optimistic about our ability to solve it and improve millions or hundreds of millions of lives — through research,” Rosenberg wrote in an email about the significance of receiving the award.
He went on to say: “Global health research is often a hard sell because unlike the person who provides medical care and can meet the grateful patient, global health research is often designed to help people in far away countries, people who may not even be born yet. And the support of Research!America for both specific areas of research and for those advocating for this research has been crucial.”
Rosenberg has broad experience in medicine and public health, ranging from infectious diseases to injuries and mental health. His advocacy has increased funding for research and programmatic interventions for injury control and improved traffic safety not only in the U.S. but also in many developing countries.
He has conducted research and consulted widely on effective collaboration in global health. In addition, Rosenberg worked with President Oscar Arias of Costa Rica to organize a coalition to address road traffic injuries throughout Latin America and the Caribbean.
Before assuming his current position, Rosenberg served 20 years with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), including early work in smallpox eradication, enteric diseases and HIV/AIDS. He was instrumental in establishing CDC’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control (NCIPC) and became the first permanent director in 1994, serving as director and Assistant Surgeon General until 1999.
He is the author of Real Collaboration: What Global Health Needs to Succeed. He was also co-editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Injury Control and Safety Promotion. Rosenberg is a member of the Institute of Medicine, where he served seven years on the Board on Global Health.
Award benefactors Beverly and Raymond R. Sackler, MD, emeritus director of Research!America, are long-standing supporters of medical research. They have sponsored research investigations at more than a dozen leading universities in the United States and abroad through The Raymond and Beverly Sackler Foundation and the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Fund for the Arts and Sciences.
Other 2013 Research!America Advocacy Award winners are U.S. Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC); U.S. Sen. Bob Casey (D-PA); John F. Crowley, a patient advocate who is chairman and CEO of Amicus Therapeutics Inc., Dr. John Mendelsohn, director of the Khalifa Institute for Personalized Cancer Therapy and former president at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center; Diane Rehm, host of the Diane Rehm Show on NPR; and the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine.
Research!America is the nation’s largest nonprofit public education and advocacy alliance working to make research to improve health a higher national priority. The 2013 Advocacy Awards represent Research!America’s 17th year of recognizing the accomplishments of leading advocates for medical and health research. For more information, visit www.researchamerica.org/advocacy_awards.
