Schillinger Wins Public Health Award

Dean Schillinger, MD, a professor of medicine at UC San Francisco, has been awarded the 2013 Everett M. Rogers Public Health Communication Award by the American Public Health Association.

Dean Schillinger, MD

The award is given to an individual who has made an outstanding contribution toward advancing the study or practice of public health communication.

Schillinger, chief of the UCSF Division of General Internal Medicine at San Francisco General Hospital & Trauma Center, is a practicing primary care physician whose current work focuses on literacy, health communication, and chronic disease prevention and management.  

Widely recognized for his seminal work in the field of health literacy, Schillinger and his team were the first to describe the relationship between limited literacy and reduced glycemic control and higher rates of diabetes complications. Among other accomplishments, he has also developed an interactive, multilingual telephone technology to improve quality of life for people with diabetes.

Schillinger recently completed a five-year term as chief of the Diabetes Prevention and Control Program for the California Department of Public Health. He is currently the director of the Health Communications Research Program at the UCSF Center for Vulnerable Populations and is the co-founder of the Bigger Picture Campaign, a ground-breaking public health literacy social marketing initiative that engages minority youth to address the social and environmental drivers of the Type 2 diabetes epidemic in California.