2025 Annual Meeting Awards
Joseph F. Fraumeni, Jr., Distinguished Achievement Award
The ASPO Joseph F. Fraumeni, Jr. Distinguished Achievement Award is extended annually to an outstanding scientist in the area of preventive oncology, cancer control, and/or cancer prevention.
Please join us in congratulating Robert A. Hiatt, MD, PhD as this year’s Fraumeni Award Winner. Dr. Hiatt is an Emeritus Professor of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and also the Associate Director of Population Sciences for the UCSF Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center (HDFCCC). He has been the Director of Population Sciences at the UCSF HDFCCC since 2003 and served as Chair of the UCSF Dept. of Epidemiology & Biostatistics from 2006-2017. His research and teaching interests are in breast cancer, health inequities, and the social and environmental determinants of cancer. From 1998-2003 he was the first deputy director of the U. S. National Cancer Institute’s Division of Cancer Control and Population Sciences, where, among other things, he oversaw the extramural cancer epidemiology, health services research, and surveillance programs. Between 2003 and 2016 he led the Breast Cancer and the Environment Research Program and its Coordinating Center in San Francisco and served on the National Academy’s Board of Environmental Studies and Toxicology from 2012-2018. He is a past president of the American Society of Preventive Oncology and the American College of Epidemiology from whom he received the Abraham Lilienfeld Award this year for distinguished service to the field of epidemiology. Currently at UCSF he is the Principal Investigator of the National Precision Medicine Initiative, All of Us, co-PI of the NCI’s Persistent Poverty Initiative, and directs the San Francisco Cancer Initiative (SF CAN).
Joseph W. Cullen Memorial Award
The Joseph W. Cullen Memorial Award aims to appreciate an individual’s distinguished achievement in continued national tobacco control interventions, through research, through the development of prevention and cessation programs with wide-reaching public health impact, or through public policy and advocacy initiatives. Congratulations to this year’s recipient, Dr. Jamie Ostroff!
Dr. Jamie Ostroff is the Chief of Behavioral Sciences Service, Director of the Tobacco Treatment, Training and Research Lab in the Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences and Co-Leader of the Population Sciences Research Program at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC). Her clinical, research and training activities focus on addressing barriers and facilitators of high-quality implementation of tobacco treatment in cancer care and lung cancer screening settings, with particular attention to equity in access, utilization and cessation outcomes. Her CV lists over 240 journal peer-reviewed publications as well as invited presentations. Dr. Ostroff is a fellow of the Society of Behavioral Medicine, the Society for Research on Nicotine & Tobacco and the American Psychosocial Oncology Society. In 2022, she was awarded the Society of Behavioral Medicine, Cancer Special Interest Group’s Distinguished Senior Investigator Award. She was recently awarded the Ruth McCorkle Excellence in Research Mentorship Award from the American Psychosocial Oncology Society. She holds several national leadership positions including service to National Lung Cancer Roundtable, Commission on Cancer Just/Beyond ASK Task Force and the NCI-funded Cancer Centers Cessation Initiative (C3I).
Distinguished Service Award
The ASPO Distinguished Service Awards are given periodically to those individuals who have gone above and beyond in their service to the Society. This year, Dr. Henry Ciolino is the recipient of the Distinguished Service Award.
Dr. Henry P. Ciolino earned a Ph.D. in Anatomy and Cell Biology from the Louisiana State University Medical School in New Orleans, LA., and completed postdoctoral training in the laboratory of Dr. Rodney L. Levine in the Laboratory of Biochemistry of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. Moving to the National Cancer Institute, he became a Staff Scientist in the Laboratory of Metabolism before joining the faculty of the University of Texas at Austin Department of Nutritional Sciences. There, he ran an NCI-funded laboratory that studied the effect of dietary agents on the metabolic pathway mediated by the aryl hydrocarbon receptor. He returned to the NCI in 2010 in the Office of Cancer Centers (OCC) and became Director of the OCC in 2015. As Director, he oversaw an extensive revision of the Cancer Center Support Grant in 2016, formulated new ways to fund cancer centers that resulted in significant increases in their funding, and introduced four new components to the Cancer Center Support Grant that transformed centers: Community Outreach and Engagement, Cancer Research Training and Education Coordination, Shared Resource Management, and the Plan to Enhance Diversity.
The recipients will be presented with their awards at ASPO’s 2025 Annual Meeting in Philadelphia.
We are thrilled to share that the 2024 Fraumeni Award recipient is Melissa Bondy, Ph.D., of Stanford University! Dr. Bondy earned a Ph.D. in epidemiology from the University of Texas School of Public Health. She then dedicated nearly three decades of her career to the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center and the Baylor College of Medicine, serving as Director of the Childhood Cancer Epidemiology and Prevention Center- a joint center of Baylor College of Medicine, MD Anderson Cancer Center, and Texas Children’s Hospital. Later, she became the Associate Director of Cancer Prevention Sciences at Baylor College of Medicine’s Dan L. Duncan Cancer Center.
Please join us in congratulating 
Wendy Demark-Wahnefried, PhD, RD is an outstanding candidate for the ASPO Joseph F. Fraumeni, Jr. Distinguished Achievement Award given her significant and long-term scientific contributions across the cancer continuum. A nutrition scientist by training, Dr. Demark-Wahnefried began her career studying weight gain among women with breast cancer and was one of the first to document sarcopenic obesity with chemotherapy (JCO 2001). She conducted proof-of-principal studies that promoted high-nutrient, low energy density diets combined with aerobic and resistance training to reverse adverse body composition change. Achieving success, Dr. Demark-Wahnefried then focused on interventions that were grounded in behavioral theory, home-based, scalable, and aimed at mitigating outcomes associated with accelerated aging among cancer survivors. Initially using tailored mailed print interventions with or without telephone counseling, the FRESH START and RENEW randomized controlled trials (RCT) achieved significant, reproducible, and durable improvements in dietary intake and physical activity, and functional decline in international and sizable (>500) samples of cancer survivors (JCO 2007, JAMA 2009, JCO 2012). Partnering with Cooperative Extension, Harvest for Health, a statewide, home-based, vegetable gardening intervention delivered by master gardeners paired with 381 older cancer survivors will soon yield findings aimed to enhance health of survivors residing in rural areas. Her AMPLIFY (AiM, Plan and act on LIFestYles) web-based, diet and exercise, weight loss RCT is recruiting survivors of obesity-related cancers. Along with RCTs in the presurgical setting and measuring effects on tumor proliferation have yielded ~350 peer-reviewed articles. She has led efforts to disseminate best practices for lifestyle behaviors among cancer survivors including several notable policy-related papers (CA Cancer J Clin 2012, 2018; Med Sci Sports Exerc, 2010; J Natl Compr Canc Netw 2020,2021; J Clin Oncol 2022). Dr. Demark-Wahnefried is devoted to service, chairing various committees including the National Cancer Policy Forum, the World Cancer Research Fund/American Institute of Cancer Research, and ASPO, where she served on several program planning committees, director-at-large, and president (2013-2015).
The Joseph W. Cullen Memorial Award is to recognize an individuals distinguished achievement in continued national tobacco control efforts, through research, through the development of prevention and cessation programs with wide-reaching public health impact, or through public policy and advocacy initiatives. We are happy to announce the 2023 award will be presented to 
Dr. Gomez has over 20 years of experience as an epidemiologist with research interests in the role of social determinants of health, including race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status, gender, immigration status, sociocultural factors, and neighborhood contextual characteristics, on health outcomes. She is Director of the Greater Bay Area Cancer Registry, a part of the California Cancer Registry and the NCI Surveillance Epidemiology End Results (SEER) Program. She has contributed surveillance data regarding cancer incidence and outcome patterns and trends for distinct Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander and Hispanic ethnic groups, as well as cancer patterns by nativity status and neighborhood characteristics. She developed the California Neighborhoods Data System, a compilation of small-area level data on social and built environment characteristics and has used these data in more than a dozen funded studies to evaluate the impact of social and built neighborhood environment factors on disease outcomes. Her publications demonstrating the substantial heterogeneity in cancer patterns across Asian American groups are often cited as the reasons for the importance of disaggregating cancer data for this diverse population. In fact, it is because of Dr. Gomez’ efforts and advocacy that we have gained an appreciation of the substantial heterogeneity among Asians and Pacific Islanders. In addition, she coined the concept of “ethnic enclaves,” which refers to neighborhoods with high proportions of the racial/ethnic group of interest. Through the application of this concept, scientists can assess the role of racial/ethnic enclave neighborhoods as predictors of cancer risk and outcomes. Dr. Gomez’s work in neighborhood contextual research has inspired and motivated a new generation of cancer research and development of novel methodologic approaches for studies in neighborhoods and cancer.
Dr. Eissenberg began exploring methods to assess the effects of novel tobacco products in 1999, was the first to publish a clinical lab study of e-cigarette effects (Eissenberg, 2010), and the Center for the Study of Tobacco Products (CSTP) team at Virginia Commonwealth University, which Dr. Eissenberg co-directs, was the first to characterize the product characteristics, toxicant output, and nicotine delivery of JUUL e-cigarettes. Dr. Eissenberg’s significant achievements in national and international tobacco control are evidenced by 200+ publications in the past 8 years from members of the CSTP scientific team he leads. Over the past two decades, Dr. Eissenberg has been awarded over $50 million dollars in funds as principal investigator from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to study tobacco products and has been funded continuously by NIH since 1997. He has nearly 300 publications, predominantly in the area of tobacco control, his h-index on Google scholar is 76, and he is recognized by Clarivate as a Highly Cited Researcher due to having multiple highly-cited papers that rank in the top 1% in Web of Science. Dr. Eissenberg is distinguished by his leadership in bringing together national and international scientists from chemistry, economics, engineering, medicine, public policy, public health, and psychology to generate high-impact and transformative transdisciplinary tobacco regulatory science that can impact federal policy on tobacco products. He has dedicated his career to facilitating safe and ethical research aimed at decreasing tobacco-caused death and disease as a past member of the FDA’s Tobacco Product Scientific Advisory Committee and of the DHHS Secretary’s Advisory Committee on Human Research Protections. Findings from his work are providing the scientific justification for several tobacco control regulatory policies under consideration including efforts to address menthol flavoring in e-liquids and regulating nicotine emissions from e-cigarette devices. In addition, he has been a generous educator who has mentored numerous junior faculty, postdoctoral fellows and graduate students, 9 of whom have competed successfully for NIH F31 funding.
Lucile was the first African-American woman to receive a PhD in epidemiology in the United States, and in 1995 when she directed the Howard University Cancer Center she was the only African-American woman to lead any cancer institute. She is currently the Associate Director of Minority Health & Health Disparities Research, Senior Associate Dean for Community Outreach and Engagement, and Professor of Oncology at Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center at Georgetown University Medical Center. Dr. Adams-Campbell has dedicated her career to studying cancer disparities experienced by African-Americans. Her research uses clinical trials, cancer epidemiology and etiology along with lifestyle interventions to elucidate the cancer risk in African-Americans and has led to over 200 peer-reviewed publications and international recognition as an expert in minority health and health disparities research.
Bo has unequivocally demonstrated an unyielding commitment to tobacco control efforts by enabling innovative research and spearheading public education, policy and advocacy initiatives. Her strong leadership, like Dr. Cullen’s, exemplifies a commitment to fostering collaboration among scientists, health care professionals, and public health advocates involved in the struggle against tobacco and tobacco-related diseases.