Injury Center Connection Newsletter
Fall/Winter 2011

Injury Center Staff Updates and Awards

Recent Appointments

Dr. Howard Spivak began in September as the Director for the Division of Violence Prevention.  Dr. Spivak has extensive experience in the field of youth violence prevention and in management and leadership in the public sector at the state and local level and in academia. He has served as Director of Adolescent Services for the City of Boston, during which he cofounded the first community-based public health youth violence prevention program in the nation. As Deputy Commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, he was in charge of all prevention and community programs in the department and also developed the first office for violence prevention at the state level, advanced the funding of the first school-based health center in Massachusetts, and was the PI of one of the first emergency room weapon-related injury surveillance projects developed with funding from CDC.

Dr. Spivak has held many senior academic appointments including Professor of Pediatrics and Community Health at Tufts University, directed pediatric and adolescent primary care programs at several academic medical centers, and has published numerous academic and general public articles on youth violence. He has also spoken around the country and internationally about violence related issues and has worked with many community programs both in Boston and nationally addressing youth violence prevention and other
violence-related concerns.

Dr. Rita Noonan was selected as NCIPC’s new Associate Director of Program Development and Integration (ADPDI). This position is newly established and evolving and Dr. Noonan will be charged with ensuring that Injury Center programs and their priorities are well supported, widely disseminated, and implemented effectively across various settings.

Dr. Noonan has spent 10 years in the Injury Center. She joined CDC’s Division of Violence Prevention in 2001 as a behavioral scientist where she focused on creating a bridge between research and practice. Rita worked on several projects related to sexual and teen dating violence prevention, program planning and evaluation, and translation research. In 2008, she moved to the Division of Unintentional Injury Prevention to lead a team of epidemiologists, medical officers, and program experts. Her team spearheaded national efforts to reduce older adult falls, prescription drug overdoses, residential fires, and drowning.

Prior to joining CDC, Dr. Noonan worked as a sociology and women’s studies professor at the University of Iowa. In this capacity, she conducted research in Latin America on the global debt crisis, gender, social movements, and health outcomes. She has received several prestigious awards, including a Fulbright Scholarship and a MacArthur Fellowship. Dr. Noonan received her doctoral degree in sociology from Indiana University in 1998.

Staff Awards

Heads Up! Materials Receive Awards

Division of Injury Response staff received three 2011 National Health Information Awards for their Heads Up! materials. These materials received additional awards earlier this fall. Heads Up: Concussion in High School Sports and Heads Up to Schools: Know Your Concussion ABCs each received a Gold Award in the category of Total Information Program and Health Promotion/Disease and Injury Prevention Information. Also, the Heads Up "What to Expect After a Concussion" fact sheet for patients received a Merit Award in the category of Patient Education.

Injury Center Colleague of the Month Award Recipients 

• Sue Lin Yee, Senior Evaluation Scientist, Office of the Associate Director for Science-December 2011
• Kimberley Freire, Behavioral Scientist, Research, Synthesis, and Application Team in the Program Implementation and Dissemination Branch of the Division of Violence Prevention-November 2011
• Suzanne Friesen, Public Health Analyst, Office of Policy Planning and Evaluation-October 2011
• Jessica Handley, Health Communications Specialist and Web Developer, Health Communications Science Office-September 2011
• Bob Thomas, Information Technology Specialist, Office of Statistics and Computer Programming-August 2011
• Gaya Myers, Presidential Management Fellow, Division of Violence Prevention-July 2011
• Monica Ryan, Computer Scientist, Office of Program Management & Operations-June 2011