Linder Receives Statewide Piper Professor Award

Stephen H. Linder, Ph.D., associate professor in the Management, Policy and Community Health Division at The University of Texas School of Public Health at Houston, has been named one of 15 recipients of the 2004 Minnie Stephens Piper Professorship.

Stephen H. Linder, Ph.D.

Each year since 1958, the Minnie Stevens Piper Foundation has honored professors from colleges and universities in Texas by recognizing outstanding achievement as effective and dedicated teachers.

“Dr. Linder demonstrates a consummate ability to stimulate intellectual growth and creative thinking among his students,” said Cynthia L. Chappell, Ph.D., professor and associate dean for academic affairs at the School of Public Health. “He has a magnificent ability to present complex ideas in new and unusual ways, setting them in context, exploring their meaning, inventing compelling analogies, and encouraging others to do the same.”

Linder recently was named interim director of the Institute for Health Policy at the School of Public Health. He joined the public health faculty in 1984 after teaching at Tulane University and the University of California at Los Angeles.

He was one of the principal architects behind the creation and development of the school’s discipline of Management and Policy Sciences. He has introduced more than 30 new, semester-length courses on topics ranging from systems theory to social justice, has directed more than 80 individual studies, and has supervised 23 doctoral dissertations.

“Dr. Linder taught me how to think,” wrote former student Karen Jaynes Williams, Ph.D., assistant professor of health sciences at Texas Southern University, in a letter of support for his nomination for the Piper Professor Award. “More importantly, he taught me how to use the power of critical thinking to pursue my own ‘visions of excellence and revelations of beauty’ toward a more just world. I believe that the teacher who dares to give this gift is rare. Dr. Linder is one of these teachers.”

Another former student, Alan L. Wells, Ph.D., senior research associate at the American Medical Association Institute for Ethics, wrote, “Stephen Linder’s one-onone supervision of my dissertation research was guided by a deep understanding of my personal and academic goals. This made the dissertation an experience of intellectual breakthrough and discovery.”

At the School of Public Health, Linder has received Dean’s Teaching Excellence/Outstanding Faculty Awards and the 1999 John P. McGovern Outstanding Teacher Award. He has been appointed to the teaching staff of the Academic Leadership Development Program at the UT Health Science Center at Houston. In addition, he developed and teaches each summer a two-day workshop on “Exploring Scholarship” for doctoral students at Texas Woman’s University.

“When done well, teaching stimulates and focuses creative energy in pursuit of greater understanding; it is contagious and liberating, but can be agonistic and a challenge to self-certainty,” Linder said. “These demands reach beyond the rigors of personal scholarship to the capacity to challenge settled opinions and practices in ways that provide critical reflection. It must be done with enthusiasm and an incessant curiosity that encourages engagement and re-thinking.

“There are few other pursuits quite like it, combining excitement and creative demands with collective engagement and illumination,” he said. “I continue to teach because it has defined who I am and continues to offer a way of being that is so full of possibilities.”

Linder has published widely and has served as a site visitor for the National Center for Infectious Diseases’ Dengue Program in San Juan, Puerto Rico; as a member of the scientific advisory board of the Electric Power Research Institute; as a member of the Board of Directors of El Centro de Corazon, a community service organization for troubled adolescent girls; and as a founding advisor to St. Luke’s Episcopal Health Charities.

As a Piper Professor, Linder received an honorarium of $5,000 and a gold commemorative pin.

He is one of only four current faculty members at the UT Health Science Center to be named a Piper Professor. The others are: Lu Ann Aday, Ph.D., the Lorne D. Bain Distinguished Professor of Public Health and Medicine at the School of Public Health; Kathleen R. Gibson, Ph.D., professor of neurobiology and anatomy in the UT Medical School at Houston, professor of orthodontics in the UT Dental Branch at Houston, and a faculty member in the UT Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences at Houston; and John McMahon, Ph.D., professor of integrative biology and pharmacology in the Medical School.

— Ina Fried, Public Affairs