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Photo credit: Randall Scott |
Laurie Schwab Zabin ’46, Recipient of the 2008 AAVC Award for Distinguished Achievement, Will Give On-Campus Talk
On Friday, February 8, AAVC will honor Laurie Schwab Zabin ’46 with the seventh annual Award for Distinguished Achievement. Before the on-campus dinner and award ceremony on the 8th, Zabin will speak to members of the Vassar community on Thursday in a talk entitled “Poetry-->Population-->Public Health: Choice, or Chance?” that traces her path from a senior thesis at Vassar on the poetry of Dylan Thomas to an M.A. at Harvard in English literature to a Ph.D. in population dynamics from the Johns Hopkins University to the position of professor in that same university’s department of population, reproductive, and family health at the Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Recognized as one of the most cited authors in the social sciences, Zabin’s research focuses on interventions for adolescents, abortion and its aftereffects, and women at high risk of pregnancy and sexually transmitted infection in the United States, and she has testified and spoken broadly on reproductive health and rights. Zabin was the founding director of the Bill and Melinda Gates Institute for Population and Reproductive Health, and since establishing the institute has extended her research to the developing world, with current research projects underway on adolescents and youth in Shanghai, Taipei, and Hanoi. Zabin has authored three books and many articles, book chapters, and reports.
Before academia and research, Zabin served with Planned Parenthood at the local, national, and international levels, including as acting director and president of the Maryland affiliate and, in the 1960s, helped to bring some of the first federal funding into the family planning field.
Zabin will join her AAVC Award with ones she has received from, among others, the American Public Health Association, the American Civil Liberties Union of Maryland, and the Johns Hopkins University, which established a fellowship in reproductive health in her honor in 2002.