Professor Receives Public Health Leadership in Medicine Award.

Megan Sandel (SPH’02), associate professor of environmental health and associate professor of pediatrics at the School of Medicine, received the Public Health Leadership in Medicine Award from the Massachusetts Public Health Association (MPHA) at its spring awards breakfast on June 2.

The MPHA recognized Sandel for her work at the intersection of pediatrics and health equity. Sandel is the associate director of the GROW Clinic for Children at Boston Medical Center (BMC) and a principal investigator with Children’s HealthWatch. The GROW Clinic is an outpatient subspecialty clinic for children from the Greater Boston area who have been diagnosed with failure to thrive—insufficient weight gain or unhealthy weight loss.

Sandel is the former pediatric medical director of Boston Health Care for the Homeless, and is a nationally recognized expert on housing and child health. In 1998, she and her colleagues at BMC published the DOC4Kids report, a first-of-its-kind national report on how housing affects children’s health. In 2001, she became the first medical director of the founding site for medical-legal partnerships, Medical-Legal Partnership-Boston, and from 2007 to 2016 she served as the medical director of the National Center for Medical-Legal Partnership. She has also worked extensively with the Boston Public Health Commission and Massachusetts Department of Public Health to improve the health of vulnerable children, particularly those with asthma.

“As a physician, I’ve appreciated more and more the critical role that public health plays in the health of communities,” Sandel says. “To be acknowledged as a leader in this field is humbling and inspires me to do even more.”

The Massachusetts Public Health Association (MPHA) is a statewide membership organization promoting action for equity in health through advocacy, public education, community organizing, and coalition building.