Joyce Cohen Lashof (March 27, 1926 in Philadelphia – June 4, 2022) was an American physician,

public health Public health is "the science and art of preventing disease, prolonging life and promoting health through the organized efforts and informed choices of society, organizations, public and private, communities and individuals". Analyzing the det ...

expert and advocate for health equity. She was the first woman to head a state public health department and the first woman to serve as dean of the School of Public Health at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

Early life and education

Lashof graduated from

Duke University Duke University is a private research university in Durham, North Carolina. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present-day city of Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1892. In 1924, tobacco and electric power industrialist James ...

in 1946, followed by the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania. She completed her residency in internal medicine at Montefiore Hospital.

Career

Lashof was hired as assistant professor in the department of medicine at the

University of Chicago The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, U of C, or UChi) is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its main campus is located in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chicago is consistently ranked among the b ...

and received a series of 1-year contracts. When she asked for a standard 3-year appointment, the department chair told her that “he would never give a married woman a tenured track appointment because she would leave and go where her husband's career took him”. Lashof joined the department of preventive medicine at the University of Illinois College of Medicine. Lashof was director of the Mile Square Health Center in Chicago, which serves disadvantaged communities, from 1967 to 1971. She went on to become director of community medicine at Presbyterian-St. Luke’s Hospital in Chicago. In 1973, she became the first woman to be director of the State of Illinois Public Health Department. In 1977 she was appointed deputy assistant secretary for health at the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare in Washington, D.C. In 1981 she was appointed dean of the school of public health at the

. In 1995, she received the Sedgwick Memorial Medal.

Personal life and death

Lashof was married to

Richard Lashof Richard K. Lashof (November 9, 1922 – February 4, 2010) was an American mathematician. He contributed to the field of Geometric topology, geometric and differential topology, working with Shiing-Shen Chern, Stephen Smale, among others. Lashof is ...

, a math professor at the

and had three children, Judith, who died in 2018, Carol, and Dan. Lashof died of heart failure on June 4, 2022 in Berkeley, aged 96 years.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Lashof, Joyce 1926 births 2022 deaths 20th-century American physicians 20th-century American women physicians UC Berkeley School of Public Health faculty American public health doctors Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania alumni Duke University alumni American university and college faculty deans State health commissioners of the United States Women public health doctors