Five Questions photography by andrew hanenburg Kudos to Mark Robson, PhD, MPH, who won the 2009 ASPH (Association of Schools of Public Health)/Pfizer Award for Teaching Excellence. The award comes with a $10,000 prize, and Robson has big plans for this money. What did winning the ASPH/Pfizer award mean to you? To be nominated by a former student and recognized by my peers, it really doesn’t get much better than this. The wonderful thing about being recognized for your teaching is that it’s really not about you, it’s about your students. The measure of a good teacher is the success of your students, and I have been lucky to have taught so many outstanding young men and women. What do you intend to do with the $10,000 prize? I’m donating it to the Foundation of UMDNJ for scholarships. My purpose in doing this is twofold. I’d like students to benefit from it, and I also hope to encourage other faculty-funded scholarships. We’re going to set aside $2,500 of the prize money to fund international field work for an SPH student in Thailand, where I do a lot of my research. Please talk about this work in Thailand. This is an NIH funded ITREOH (International Training and Research in Environmental and Occupational Health) project. This grant is a collaboration with the Chulalongkorn University College of Public Health Sciences, UMDNJ-School of Public Health, and Rutgers University School of of Environmental and Biological Sciences. I usually travel to Thailand four times per year as part of this project. I am a visiting professor at Chulalongkorn University and Prince of Songkla University. The focus of my work is on exposures to pesticides, including residential and agricultural exposures.

How did you become interested in public health? I started out as an agricultural scientist, which I suppose at heart I still am, but I learned early on that to be a successful pesticide specialist I needed to know a lot more about public health, so I decided to retool and go for an MPH. This was several years after getting my doctorate. Public health has to be one of the best areas in which to work. All sorts of people from varied backgrounds come into public health and contribute to our knowledge base. Public health is readily transportable and adaptable anywhere in the world. From clinicians to applied and basic research scientists, each of us can make a contribution and make a difference.

Describe your relationships with your students. They’ve been my inspiration and motivation. It’s a thrill to see someone like David Rich, who was my undergraduate advisee, go on to the Harvard School of Public Health, get his doctoral degree, and then return to our school as an energetic and successful faculty member. I guess what it means to be acknowledged as a good teacher can be summed up in a note I received from a student:

Last week I received my final transcript from SPH, stating that I had received
my MPH. What a thrilling feeling it was to see it in writing! I would like to take
this opportunity to thank you from the bottom of my heart for your support and
encouragement. I could not have done it without you. You are certainly a student advocate extraordinaire!

— as told to Mary Ann Littell