The National Maternal and Child Health (MCH) Epidemiology Awards recognize the scientific, programmatic, and administrative accomplishments of MCH leaders in the field. Moreover, the awards incentivize other professionals in MCH to disseminate new or innovative work occurring across the United States, and offer opportunity to acknowledge impact nationally, and at the state and local levels. The awards were initiated in 2000 and recipients reported previously, though awardee demographics have not been historically reviewed. This summary presents the definitions of all awards including refinements to increase inclusion of different types of eligible nominees, describes the diversity of awardees by gender, and place of employment at the time of the award, and comments on gaps identified in the recognition of MCH epidemiology professionals.

The Coalition for Excellence in MCH Epidemiology (referred to as ‘the Coalition’) has nationally recognized the significant contributions of individuals, teams, institutions, and leaders committed to improving the health of women, children, infants, and families by advancing public health knowledge, practice, research, teaching, mentoring, and data use (Sappenfield, 2001; Sappenfield & Chavez, 2002; Sappenfield et al., 2003, 2004; Kroelinger & Sappenfield, 2010; Kroelinger, 2011; Kroelinger & Jones, 2012; Kroelinger et al., 2014, 2016). The Coalition is represented by 16 MCH agencies and organizations (Table 1), with the goal of promoting excellence in the field of MCH epidemiology. The purpose of the national awards is to highlight contributions to MCH in the following four thematic areas (CityMatCH website):

These four areas are represented by awards in six categories which are listed below with a short description; the categories have been refined over time to broaden the eligibility criteria intended to increase the number and diversity of nominees (CityMatCH website).

The purpose of this national or international award is to recognize individuals and organizational teams from a variety of disciplines who have made a substantial contribution to advancing the knowledge base aimed at improving the health of women, children, and families. It is expected that the new knowledge contributed by the awardee has led the MCH field to consider new approaches and or discover new findings related to a MCH problem.

The purpose of this award is to recognize individuals, organizational leaders, organizational units, and institutions who make significant contributions to public health practice in MCH at the community, state, tribal, or national levels through the effective use of data and epidemiology. This award has been expanded to include effective practice at the national, state, and community level to increase diversity in eligible nominations.

The purpose of this award is to recognize leaders and organizational teams who serve at a local, state, or national level and who have made significant contributions to the field by enhancing the political will to advance knowledge and to support public health practice through effective use of data, epidemiology, and applied research.

The purpose of this award is to recognize an individual or organization with a strong history of excellence in teaching; training in the use of data, MCH epidemiologic methods, and applied research; and/or has an outstanding record of mentoring students, trainees, fellows, and early career professionals. This award, first offered in 2006, was focused on teaching and training in the use of data, epidemiologic methods, and applied research. In 2014 this award was expanded to emphasize mentoring of early career professionals, increasing eligible nominees to faculty who may work in non-tenured track teaching positions. Also, adding the mentoring criterion provides support for earlier career faculty to be competitively nominated.

The purpose of this award is to recognize an early career, outstanding professional leader whose work demonstrates significant contributions to the MCH epidemiology field in one or more of the other award categories. This award had been previously defined for receipt by MCH professionals below the age of 40. To expand the definition of early career and increase eligibility, in 2016, this award was expanded to allow the nomination of any MCH professional with less than 10 years of experience working in the field MCH following a terminal degree, removing the age limitation. By removing the age requirement, the early career professional award has increased the professional population of eligible nominees.

The purpose of this award is to recognize an internationally or nationally known expert or team of experts who have contributed broadly and substantially to the advancement of the field of MCH epidemiology throughout their career, and whose work has a significant and lasting impact.

Potential award recipients are nominated by peers and the final awardees are selected by the National MCH Epidemiology Awards Selection Committee, comprised of members of the Coalition, for official recognition during the biennial CityMatCH Leadership and MCH Epidemiology Conference, with further acknowledgment on the CityMatCH website, (CityMatCH website) and in this summary (Table 2).

Since inception, the Coalition has presented 111 awards to deserving nominees (Table 2). The category most frequently awarded is Effective Practice. Recognition of MCH epidemiology work impacting national, state, and community levels offers opportunity to acknowledge accomplishments in varied settings. To date, 45 awards have been given for Effective Practice including 13 at the national level, 18 at the state level, and 14 at the community level. Early Career Professional Achievement is the next most presented award, with 20 awardees, followed by the Greg Alexander Award for Advancing Knowledge offered to 18 awardees. The Outstanding Leadership award and the Zena Stein and Mervyn Susser Award for Lifetime Achievement follow with 14 awards presented for leadership and eight awards presented for lifetime achievements. Finally, the Outstanding Teaching and Mentoring award has been presented to six awardees. All categories of awards have included recipients from all areas of public health (e.g., researchers, federal, state, or county health departments, and community advocates).

Awardees represent diverse types of MCH professionals, employed in various positions supporting MCH populations they serve with almost equal distribution of awards by gender. Among all previous awardees, 37 were employed at academic institutions, 33 in federal government, 32 in state or county government (22 at state health departments and 10 at county health departments), seven employed by non-profit organizations and two in clinical organizations (Table 2). Examining gender, 97 awards of 111 were presented to individual awardees, and of those, 49 have been presented to women and 48 to men.

Recent literature suggests that national awards in medicine and science lack diversity and equity. For instance, in the fields of emergency medicine, neurology, pathology, physical medicine and rehabilitation, differences persist in the proportion of female physician receipt of national awards compared with male physicians (Silver et al., 2017, 2018; Wobker et al., 2022; Jacobs et al., 2023) with some awarding male physicians more than five to one (Silver et al., 2017). Moreover, in a recent study of national awards for early and mid-career researchers among scientific societies, a guidance developed for ‘best researcher’ awards encouraged nominations of individuals from diverse groups, termed ‘under-represented,’ but the guidance did not clearly define these groups or criteria by which these nominations could be evaluated (Lagisz et al., 2023). Similarly, awards targeting early career professionals in ecology and evolution were inflexible with the age requirements (Lagisz et al., 2023). Lastly, most awards given to scientists in the United States were more likely to be titled using male names, potentially reinforcing preferences for male awardees, evidenced by only 31% of awardees identifying as female prior to 2010 (Lagisz et al., 2023). In epidemiology, though more women have been entering the field, evidence suggests that fewer are chairing academic departments, publishing as senior authors on manuscripts, and are less likely to be chief editors in scientific journals, despite the significant increase in membership of women in professional societies (Schisterman et al., 2017; Aldrich et al., 2019). Limited leadership opportunity impacts career trajectory and recognition (Aldrich et al., 2019). By comparison, the MCH epidemiology awards, as discussed in this paper, are almost equally distributed by gender and offer a flexible definition of early career to accommodate individuals who may enter the field of MCH later or experience breaks in a career for various reasons (e.g., parenting responsibilities, higher education opportunities). Though the awards do not reflect the distribution of working MCH professionals by gender, the proportion of women awarded by the Coalition is higher than in other areas of science.

Although the MCH epidemiology awards have diversity in representation by professional type and gender, gaps exist. Additional assessment of past awardees could provide further understanding of how the MCH epidemiology awards influence career trajectory and advancement. In a recent study of orthopedics, although a national award was developed to recognize women’s research, post-award only 62.5% held leadership positions and less than half were faculty at top 5 orthopedic surgery programs in a review of previous awardees (Czerwonka et al., 2023). Future review of award recipients, by the Coalition, could provide insight into the career trajectories of awardees by gender and their impacts in the field of MCH epidemiology in the decade following award receipt.

Challenges among the larger MCH public health workforce including decreasing public health budgets, retirements of those in the workforce, reorganizations, furloughs, and vacant public health positions (Kavanagh, 2015) impact the structure and function of MCH in public health. Additionally, leadership workforce development and training opportunities in MCH are limited (CityMatCH training website; CityMatCH archived training website), though organizations continue to modify training content in response to MCH professional feedback (Kroelinger et al., 2012; HRSA doctoral training website; CityMatCH training website). To address these workforce and leadership gaps in the field of MCH, federal agencies, professional organizations, and state and local health departments have collaborated to place senior MCH epidemiologists, student interns and fellows in the field (Rochat et al., 1999; CDC assignees website; AEF fellows website; HRSA MCH Workforce website). These agencies have also developed continuing education programs (CityMatCH training website) and workforce development capacity-building grants (HRSA MCH Workforce website) for MCH professionals that support engagement regardless of level of experience. Improving workforce and leadership opportunities for all MCH professionals can address gaps identified in this review—offering resources beyond training to early career professionals in MCH epidemiology.

The Coalition and the MCH awards were initiated to recognize leadership contributions in MCH epidemiology and highlight recipient commitment to improving the health of women, children, and families (Sappenfield, 2001). By acknowledging current award category gaps requiring additional attention, and understanding career trajectory and workforce development opportunities, the Coalition can improve future awards processes.

The Coalition is encouraged to review the findings in this assessment and address gaps identified. To support continued recognition of excellence, the nomination announcement for the next cycle of the National MCH Epidemiology Awards will be issued in January of 2024. Coalition members urge readers to consider the nomination of peers and colleagues in all award categories highlighting their important scientific, programmatic, and administrative contributions to the field of MCH epidemiology.

Though this summary shares how the Coalition revised award criteria and categories over the last two decades and provides a review of awardees by place of employment and gender, further changes are necessary to emphasize inclusion and representativeness. As the concept of equity continues to gain momentum in public health (Liburd et al., 2020; Brownson et al., 2023; CDC ’s Health Equity Intervention and Action Principles; CDC’s CORE Commitment to Health Equity), assuring awardees represent the diverse populations served in MCH and support implementation of equitable practices in program and leadership reinforces recognition of this concept. Such change not only will improve award impact and relevance, it also ensures the awards can remain an integral part of recognizing emerging and established leaders in MCH who are moving the field forward.