September 1, 2015

In late June, the Department of Community Health and Prevention (CHP) and the School of Public Health lost one of its most valued faculty members, Dr. Lisa Ulmer. Dr. Ulmer joined the Drexel faculty in 2003 as Department Chair of CHP, a role in which she served with distinction until 2010. She continued as an esteemed senior member of our faculty.  She also served as Interim Chair of the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics from 2006-2008.

As Founding Chair of the Department of Community Health and Prevention, Dr. Ulmer mentored many students, faculty, and staff. Prior to coming to Drexel, she served as Professor and Director of the Health Policy Concentration at the Nelson Mandela School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs at Southern University in Louisiana and had previously served in assistant and associate professor roles at the University of Tennessee, Catholic University, and Johns Hopkins University.  Lisa received her Sc.D. in Psychiatric Epidemiology from the Johns Hopkins University and her MSW from Catholic University. She was also a family therapist and previously did a lot of work in children’s mental health.

While serving at Drexel, Lisa kept up an intense research portfolio with funding from the National Science Foundation, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), both the Pennsylvania and Philadelphia Departments of Health, the Louisiana Department of Health, and the National Institutes of Health. Her research made important contributions in the areas drug prevention, tobacco control, prevention research, trauma-informed research, chronic disease prevention and cancer education, to name only a few.  She contributed to the development of programs and policies at Drexel as well as at the Association of Schools of Public Health (ASPH) where she chaired the Social Sciences Council, the Society for Prevention Research, the National Office of National Drug Control, and the CDC.   

Dr. Ulmer founded the Drexel SPH’s first doctoral program and developed much of its curriculum. She leaves behind two children, Caitlin and Justin, beloved faculty and staff colleagues and friends and several generations of graduate students to whom she was devoted as teacher, mentor and friend. Lisa left a strong imprint and was a major force in building the School we have today. She will be deeply missed by many but will live on in the School she helped build, in the students she trained and in the public health improvements she led and championed.