Passing the Torch From Teacher to Pupil

Among the many accolades that Dr. Lloyd Novick will deservedly receive in this special collection of editorials and commentaries, I want to highlight both the personal and professional mentorship that he provided me, as well as credit him with advancing the special partnerships between academia and public health practice, now known as the Academic Health Department. “Tell a good story well.” This is what Lloyd taught me. In the decade of the 1990s, I was serving as a Health Officer for the Tennessee Department of Health. I enjoyed writing, and it was my goal to publish at least a couple of papers each year, not an unreasonable goal for a public health practitioner. In my first submissions to the Journal of Public Health Management and Practice (JPHMP)…back in the days of needing to send five printed copies of the manuscript with a mailed submission (!)…I was struggling to find my footing, having no mentors around who were also publishing. Lloyd took me under his wing and encouraged me, providing advice through having me answer his basic questions: what is the “so what” of the paper? Why does it matter? Why should someone want or choose to read it? He taught me that publishing as a practitioner didn’t necessarily require a hypothesis, along with a study that produced a p value. But if I was going to tell the story of public health practice – which Lloyd believed was absolutely critical for the broader field – I must learn to “tell a good story well.” That was Lloyd’s gift to me, and, as I have learned through the years, clearly, I was not his only pupil. Another area that Lloyd deserves significant credit for through his editorship at JPHMP is the Academic Health Department (AHD). It was in JPHMP that the first publication using this moniker appeared – Bill Keck’s 2000 article entitled “Lessons learned from an academic health department.”1 Over the years, Lloyd had 3 special focus issues of JPHMP on the AHD, in 2000, 2006, and in 2014. This support of scholarly work on AHDs should come as no surprise because Lloyd was the very embodiment of such partnerships, having served as both a public health practitioner in New York State and an academician for many years at East Carolina University. For the third special issue focus on AHDs, I had the honor of serving as guest editor of the issue, along with Bill Keck. Lloyd continued to have articles featuring the AHD, and in many of these I partnered with Ross Brownson, who has been the leader in conducting research on AHDs. Through Ross’ mentorship, Stephanie Mazzucca-Ragan (Washington University) is currently leading research on AHDs through a National Cancer Institute/NIH-funded R37 grant. NIH-funded research on AHDs – who would have guessed? Stephanie has continued with first-authored papers in JPHMP on the AHD. Thus from Lloyd’s initial support for Bill Keck’s 2000 article to Stephanie’s most recent article on AHD partnerships in 2024,2 the lines from teacher to pupil continue. That may be the best story told well because it keeps the memory of Lloyd alive through the work he led, facilitated, and supported. I will be forever in his debt.