McCurdy Receives ASPPH Practice Excellence Award
Professor Sheryl McCurdy, PhD, MA, at UTHealth Houston School of Public Health, was honored with the Association of Schools and Programs of Public Health (ASPPH) Practice Excellence Award at this year’s ASPPH Annual Meeting. The inaugural ASPPH Practice Excellence Award recognizes exemplary faculty across the nation who have proved scholarly public health practice in advancing and integrating research, teaching, and service.
“It’s really an honor to have your work recognized at the national level,” McCurdy shared. “As a qualitative social scientist working in this public health arena, to be appreciated for the different sorts of skills, research, and practices a historical ethnographer brings to public health issues is especially rewarding.
McCurdy, with the Department of Health Promotion and Behavioral Sciences, is a community-engaged scholar with a long history of partnering with marginalized communities to address stressors creating pressing public health issues.
“Dr. McCurdy is truly a community-engaged scholar, and we are deeply proud of this national recognition for her innovative work in public health practice. Sheryl has demonstrated expertise in practice through her research in the U.S. and on the African Continent,” shared Department Chair Christine Markham, PhD, who wrote her letter of support. “Her work has led to innovative community efforts in harm reduction and recovery and genomic research. She is a remarkable educator and researcher as her programming has been used as a model by the Ministries of Health and clinics in Tanzania and Kenya, and for recovery programs across Texas.
As an Africanist ethnographer, studying the culture of a particular society, McCurdy has spent her career devoted to addressing global health issues affecting a wide range of communities. In her tenure, she has developed research in the areas of substance abuse, social services, AIDS and HIV testing, and aided the development of the first free public medication assisted treatment clinic on the African continent.
Recognition of her research led to her service on the Global Commission on Drug Policy’s effort to develop a drug policy for West Africa.
In Texas, McCurdy’s teams’ harm reduction and recovery efforts include training projects to develop the peer recovery specialist workforce and a recovery residence network for people taking medication to recover from problematic opioid use. Her community partner, Jason Howell, the Executive Director of RecoveryPeople notes that it was McCurdy’s tenacity and encouragement that made Project HOMES a reality. When frustration was mounting after repeated budget revisions and doubt of growing funds, he suggested they might have run out of options and it was time to consider moving on, Mr. Howell notes, “Thankfully Sheryl encouraged us to keep trying” and rewrite all our budgets one more time. Over the last five years, the Project HOMES team has worked with community partners to open and evaluate recovery outcomes in 15 medication-assisted recovery residences.
She has co-chaired the Education and Coordinated Training Working Group and served on the Ethics and Regulatory Issues and Community Engagement Working Group. McCurdy has served on the board of the African Studies Association, several subcommittees, and chaired a COVID series of panels. She is a member of the International Journal of Drug Policy editorial board.
Through her various projects, McCurdy has been positioned to share scholarly public health practice within research, teaching, and service to the many public health students she has taught. “As a faculty member I am grateful to my colleagues and students and the leadership who valued this work and not only tolerated, but celebrated, my Tanzanian community engagement efforts that took a great deal of my time and attention. Without their support it would have been difficult to engage in this work,” McCurdy shared.
“We applaud her commitment to training the next generation of public health leaders in practice- and community-engaged research in the U.S. and globally,” said Markham, professor and Allan King Professorship in Public Health.