August 01, 2011
Dr. Joanne Jordan

Dr. Joanne Jordan

Joanne M. Jordan, MD, MPH, adjunct professor of epidemiology in the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health, has received the 2011 Distinguished Service to Rural Life Award from the Rural Sociological Society (RSS).

 
Jordan also is director of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Thurston Arthritis Research Center and professor of orthopaedics in the UNC School of Medicine.
 
The award was established to recognize those who have made an outstanding contribution to the enhancement of rural life and rural people. Through her work on the Johnston County (N.C.) Osteoarthritis Project, Jordan has dedicated herself for more than 20 years to improving the health of rural North Carolinians.
 
“Dr. Jordan’s initial idea to focus on a rural area, her steadfastness in pursuing that idea and keeping it alive for 20 years (and for the foreseeable future), and her commitment to the project by staying close to the county and the staff all speak to me of an outstanding contribution to the enhancement of rural life and rural people,” said Charles G. Helmick, MD, scientific lead for the Arthritis Program at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion.
 
“[Her] work and that of her colleagues has really re-defined how we conceptualize musculoskeletal problems in a rural population,” said Timothy S. Carey, MD, MPH, director of the Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research at UNC and adjunct professor of epidemiology at UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health. “Dr. Jordan’s research is exemplary in the area of translation science, and I frequently use it as the model for other researchers to emulate.”Leigh F. Callahan, PhD, director of the methodology core at the UNC Thurston Arthritis Research Center, has worked with Jordan for 13 years. “What Dr. Jordan has done over the past 20 years – establish a unique model of rural community-based research, further the biologic and genetic knowledge base of osteoarthritis, uncover ethnic and geographic health disparities – few have done over an entire career,” Callahan said.
 
A native of New York City, Jordan received her Bachelor of Arts degree, with distinction in all subjects, from Cornell University in 1977; her medical degree from The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in 1981; and her Master of Public Health degree in epidemiology from UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health in 1991. She completed training in internal medicine and sub-specialty training in rheumatology and immunology at Duke University Medical Center from 1981 through 1986.She joined the UNC School of Medicine’s Division of Rheumatology and Immunology in 1987. She currently is the Herman and Louise Smith Distinguished Professor of Medicine in Arthritis and the chief of the Division of Rheumatology, Allergy and Immunology.
 
 

UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health contact: Ramona DuBose, director of communications, (919) 966-7467 or ramona_dubose@unc.edu.

 

 

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