Assistant Professor Joseph Lewnard wins Chancellor’s Award for Research in the Public Interest

Berkeley Public Health is pleased to announce that Dr. Joseph Lewnard, assistant professor of epidemiology, has been selected to receive the prestigious 2021-2022 Chancellor’s Award for Public Service.

The Chancellor’s Awards for Public Service honor individuals and groups for their exceptional commitment to advancing social change through public service, a pillar of the university’s public mission.

Dr. Lewnard was selected to receive an award for Research in the Public Interest, which recognizes faculty members for research that addresses critical issues affecting our local, state, national, or global communities.

“I think the award encompasses basically all my COVID work,” said Lewnard. “This work has included high-impact studies both internationally and at home in California filling in gaps around our understanding of the epidemiology of COVID-19 both at the time of its original incursion and with the emergence of new variants; the effectiveness of vaccines and non-pharmaceutical measures such as masks in preventing spread; the transmission dynamics of SARS-CoV-2 in India; and the burden of mortality due to COVID-19 in that setting. All of this work has been undertaken in direct collaboration with stakeholders including CDC, CDPH, Kaiser Permanente, and regional health ministries.”

“COVID-19 brought a cataclysmic interruption to everything I had started and planned to be working on in my first years as faculty here at Berkeley,” he Lewnard. “But developing these partnerships with state, federal, and international public health agencies has been immensely rewarding and I am humbled to see our collaborative research efforts recognized by the Chancellor’s office.”