Dr. Novick and the Academic Health Department

Posted on October 29, 2025 by Jay Maddock Leave a comment

This entry is part 1 of 2 in the series Public Health Trailblazers

Lloyd’s work fundamentally influenced me long before I ever met him. As a recently minted PhD in experimental psychology, I had moved to Hawaii in 1999 for a post-doctoral fellowship at the Cancer Research Center of Hawaii. A year later, I was hired as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Public Health Sciences at the University of Hawaii at Manoa for a new program called the Healthy Hawaii Initiative. Funded by Tobacco Settlement dollars, this program imbedded academic faculty members in the state health department to provide research and evaluation support.

Up until that point, my entire exposure to public health was one course in epidemiology. I loved working at the health department on real-world problems while also bringing scientific rigor and peer-reviewed publications to the process. I wondered why so few academics in public health had real-world health department experience.

Within a short time, I ran across Lloyd’s writing on the concept of an academic health department, and I was just floored. This was exactly what I had been thinking about, and it helped me to fully crystalize my thoughts about how health departments and academic organizations could be integrated.

Within the next few years, I was involved in a variety of leadership positions including chair of the Hawaii Board of Health and a nine-year stint as department head. In these roles, I was able to implement many of Lloyd’s ideas, including embedding more faculty in the state health department and having health department staff teaching our students. We created a partnership between the Hawaii Department of Health and the University of Hawaii called the Hawaii Journal of Medicine and Public Health. For three years I co-edited this journal with a department of health staff member.

I finally got to meet Lloyd in 2014 when I joined the editorial board of the Journal of Public Health Management and Practice. Getting to work with someone who had such a profound influence on my career was a cherry on top of everything. I continued to learn from him over the past decade and believe his legacy will continue to live on.

Today, I am an appointed member of the Brazos County (Texas) Board of Health and edit a journal called the Journal of Healthy Eating and Active Living, which has a specific call for practice-based articles. I appreciate how Lloyd has given me a lifelong love of connecting public health research and practice.

Recommended Reading

See Also

Academic Health Departments Featured Collection at JPHMP

About the Author

Jay Maddock: Jay E. Maddock, PhD, FAAHB, is a Professor of Public Health at Texas A&M University. Dr. Maddock previously served as Dean of the Texas A&M School of Public Health and director of the University of Hawaii Public Health Program. He is internationally recognized for his research in social ecological approaches to increasing physical activity.

Dean Maddock received his undergraduate degree in psychology and sociology, magna cum laude, from Syracuse University and his master’s and doctorate degrees in experimental psychology from the University of Rhode Island.

Dr. Maddock has been named the Bank of Hawai‘i Community Leader of the Year and received the Award of Excellence from the American Public Health Association, Council on Affiliates. He has chaired the state board of health, co-authored the state physical activity and nutrition plan and was a charter member of the NIH study section on Community-Level Health Promotion. He has served as principal investigator on over $18 million in extramural funding. He is an author of over 110 scientific articles and the editor of three books. He previously served as president of the American Academy of Health Behavior. His research has been featured in several national media outlets, including The Today Show, Eating Well, Prevention, and Good Housekeeping. Dr. Maddock has given invited lectures in numerous countries, including Australia, Korea, Japan, Germany China, Taiwan, Indonesia, El Salvador, and Brazil, and he had held honorary professorships at two universities in China.