Appreciation Dinner

Rollins alumni, faculty, staff, and friends gathered at the Capital City Club in February for an evening to celebrate donors and scholarship recipients. The Distinguished Achievement and Matthew Lee Girvin Alumni Awards presentation kicked off the event, followed by a reception and dinner.

Rollins Alumni Association Awards

Distinguished Achievement Award

Dr. Diane Harris 10MPH (pictured above, right) would like for people to be able to eat better. Harris’s career has included positions in both academia and government where she has developed new research and initiatives to advance wellness and prevent chronic disease through better nutrition. She currently serves as a health scientist and team lead at the CDC in the Division of Nutrition, Physical Activity, and Obesity. She is also an adjunct faculty member at Emory University in the graduate Nutrition and Health Sciences program and in Georgia State University’s Department of Nutrition.

In her current post, Harris promotes policy, systems, and environmental change strategies that increase access and availability to healthy foods in multiple settings. That work falls into three main areas: developing institutional food service guidelines based on Dietary Guidelines for Americans for settings such as hospitals, universities and colleges, private workplaces, and state, local, and tribal government facilities; promoting a healthy supply of food coming into institutions, particularly through “farm to” programs; and promoting ways to increase demand for healthy foods in various settings through behavioral design strategies.

Harris provides subject matter expertise to the CDC and grantees and is often called upon as a national expert in a number of areas related to creation of healthy food environments. She worked extensively on Let’s Move Salad Bars to Schools, part of former First Lady Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move! initiative, serving as a liaison to the White House and participating in a congressional briefing.

Matthew Lee Girvin Award

Since earning her MPH in 2011, Lieutenant Commander Charlotte Kaboré, United States Public Health Service, has dedicated her career to reducing morbidity and mortality attributable to preventable diseases and improving the quality of life of underserved communities. She grew up in a region of the Mississippi Delta with only one county health department that provided services to nearly 70,000 people. Her first-hand experience witnessing the impact of health disparities on poor, rural communities of color influenced her desire to pursue a public health career with a focus on underserved populations.

Kaboré currently serves as a public health analyst in the CDC’s HIV Prevention Branch within the Division of Global HIV & TB, which is one of the primary agencies of PEPFAR. In this role, she supports program and management operation initiatives in more than 40 PEPFAR field offices around the world. Her group works with each country’s U.S. embassy, ministry of health, USAID office, and other government and nongovernmental agencies to interpret policies and regulations and assist in organizing and implementing projects.

Prior to her current post, Kaboré served in the CDC’s National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, Division of Population Health, Arthritis, Epilepsy, and Well-Being Branch, and before that in the Center of Global Health, Division of Global HIV/AIDS and TB, Overseas Strategy and Management Branch. In this latter role, she provided technical assistance to host country governments and international partners in seven West African countries to integrate HIV/AIDS clinical and preventive services and provided epidemiologic science, informatics, and research support to develop sustainable public health systems in resource-constrained countries.