- Patricia A. Maryland
Patricia A. Maryland (DrPH, HPM ’82), was a longtime member of Pitt Public Health’s Board of Visitors, an advisory group of top experts in public health, corporate and civic leaders, and alumni who are appointed by University leadership.
Before earning her Pitt degree, Maryland made history in 1974 as the first female president of the student government association at Alabama State University, where she earned a Bachelor of Science in applied mathematics. She received an MS in biostatistics from the University of California—Berkeley.
One of eight children, Maryland said watching her mother struggle with type 2 diabetes inspired her to get into health care.
She started her career as a strategic planner at UPMC Mercy Hospital in Pittsburgh before holding numerous strategic planning and operations positions over a 15-year career at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation.Maryland was named chief operating officer of North Oakland Medical Centers in Pontiac, Mich., in 1996 and from there transitioned into several leadership roles around the Midwest, including St. Vincent Hospitals and Health Services in Indianapolis, one of the flagships of the Ascension Health system. In 2005, she was named executive vice president and chief operating officer of St. Vincent Health. Under her leadership, St. Vincent Indianapolis Hospital received top recognition from Anthem, Leapfrog and Consumer Choice Awards for nine years straight.
A Detroit native, she was named president and CEO of St. John Providence Hospital in 2008 and was also Ascension’s Michigan ministry market leader before rising to president of healthcare operations and COO of Ascension Healthcare and then overall system president and CEO in 2017.
Throughout her career, Maryland received multiple leadership awards, including being named one of the nation’s Top 25 Leaders in Health Care by Modern Healthcare magazine.
-Mike Friend
- Donald Roger Mattison
Donald Roger Mattison, MD, former dean at Pitt Public Health (1990-98) passed away on March 22 in Columbia, S.C. He was 81. A distinguished physician, researcher and academic leader, Mattison specialized in reproductive toxicology, pharmacology, adverse drug events, and sex and gender differences in health. He published more than 400 scientific papers and authored and edited several books.
His career began in 1975 at the National Institutes of Health. In 1984, he joined the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences faculty as a professor and clinician, with a joint appointment at the National Center for Toxicological Research.
During his tenure as dean of what was then the Graduate School of Public Health, he also served as professor of environmental and occupational health and as professor of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive sciences in the School of Medicine. He later moved on to positions with the March of Dimes and the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development before finishing his career as a distinguished professor at the University of South Carolina.
A captain in the U.S. Public Health Service with over 20 years of service, Mattison served aboard the USNS Mercy following the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
In retirement, he volunteered at free clinics in Maryland and South Carolina. He is survived by his wife of 59 years, Margaret, two children, three siblings and several nieces and nephews.
-Ava Dzurenda
- Willem Gijsbert "Wilbert" Van Panhuis
Willem G. “Wilbert” Van Panhuis, MD, PhD, died April 13 after a two-year battle with glioblastoma, a brain cancer, at age 48. He held appointments as associate professor of epidemiology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Public Health and biomedical informatics in the School of Medicine. He left Pitt in 2001 to become director of the Office of Data Science and Emerging Technologies at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).
Born in the Netherlands, he completed his medical degree at the free Medical University in Amsterdam before coming to the United States and earning a doctorate in global disease epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in 2009. He joined the Pitt faculty that same year, where he quickly emerged as a leader in population health informatics, data sharing, data visualization, computational epidemiology and infectious disease surveillance on a global level. He taught courses and mentored graduate students on the epidemiology of infectious diseases and vaccines.
Van Panhuis was expert at assembling and analyzing large infectious disease epidemiology data sets, and in discovering multidecadal, continental scale patterns. He led Project Tycho, a heroic effort that digitized the history of infectious diseases in the U.S. for all cities and states from 1888 onward and used creative analytic and visualization methods to demonstrate that childhood vaccination prevented 100 million cases of serious childhood diseases. He also led a large multi-country collaboration on dengue that revealed region-wide synchrony and traveling waves of dengue across eight countries in Southeast Asia. A champion of open access to data, he led an international team that systematically identified technical, motivational, economic, political, legal and ethical barriers to public health data sharing.
In 2019, he became principal investigator of the Network Coordination Center for the NIH Models of Infectious Disease Agent Study (MIDAS), a nationwide collaborative research network of infectious disease epidemiologists, data scientists and computational modelers.
Van Panhuis served as director of the Office of Data Science and Emerging Technologies from 2021 through 2024, where he played a key role in advancing NIAID's data management and sharing strategy. He took a medical retirement in 2004. Van Panhuis’ expertise and leadership have had a profound impact on improving access and use of data for public health research globally.– Donald S. Burke, MD