Randy Schwartz joins the Wandersman Center

We are delighted to bring Randy Schwartz, MSPH, onboard with the Wandersman Center.  Randy is a nationally recognized public health professional with over thirty-five years’ experience in implementing health promotion/disease prevention initiatives in state health department and voluntary health organizations with an emphasis on chronic disease prevention and control, cancer control, tobacco control, community-based health promotion and healthy public policy. He is currently President of Public Health Systems Consultants, and serves as the Sr. Public Health Consultant for Cancer Control with the National Association of Chronic Disease Directors (NACDD). He is an Adjunct Faculty member for several leading academic public health programs. Randy has written and presented on the importance of engaging public health practitioners along with researchers and engaged communities as a key factor in advancing implementation science. 

Randy brings to The Wandersman Center his strong experience as a public health practitioner, thus grounding the reality of implementation in real world situations. He has a long history of linking public health practice with academic and research partners to advance translation, dissemination and quality implementation. Randy’s participation with the work of the Wandersman Center will help bring that lens of real world public health practice to our work.

Prior to this, he served as Vice President for Health Systems for the ACS, New England Division (2000-2015), implementing the Division's Program of Work for Cancer Prevention, Cancer Detection, and Quality of Life/Patient Support.to reduce the burden of cancer on the communities and citizens in the six-states of New England. Before this work at ACS, he was Director of the Division of Community and Family Health of the Maine Bureau of Health (now Maine CDC), where he worked for seventeen years, fifteen of which were in a senior position as a Division Director. In that role, he directed all chronic disease prevention and control and health promotion programs (including cancer control, CVD prevention, tobacco prevention and control and community health promotion/healthy communities), as well as the maternal and child health and public health nursing programs. In these positions he has directed the implementation and evaluation of health promotion/disease prevention interventions in multiple settings including community, worksite, health care and public policy.
 
Randy has participated on numerous national review panels and committees, including the Institute of Medicine Committee to Review the CDC Centers for Research and Demonstration of Health Promotion and Disease Prevention; was a member or Chair of the grant review panels for CDC’s Prevention Research Centers over a period of more than thirty years; and served as a reviewer on numerous CMS, HRSA, OASH, NIH/NCI grant review panels. He has served as a reviewer for the Cancer Prevention & Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT) and numerous other grant review and advisory panels.
 
He has authored or co-authored numerous articles on health promotion and chronic disease prevention. Randy is the Founding Editor of the journal, Health Promotion Practice, a journal of the Society for Public Health Education. He has been awarded the Society for Public Health Education’s Distinguished Fellow Award, the Society’s highest honor. 

Also, check out Randy's conversation about the role of implementation science in public health