Dr. Mary Hulihan Receives the 2024 ASH Outstanding Service Award
“This award is the greatest surprise of my professional life, so far. I have an enormous level of admiration and respect for the members of ASH, and to be nominated and selected by them for this award was truly unexpected.”
The ASH Outstanding Service Award, which is officially announced today, is presented annually to individuals in the public or private sector in recognition of effective “behind-the-scenes” leadership in areas relevant to the Society’s mission.
Mary Hulihan, DrPH, a health scientist in the Blood Disorders Surveillance and Epidemiology Branch of the Division of Blood Disorders and Public Health Genomics at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities, is being honored for her dedication to improving and extending the lives of individuals with blood diseases, including sickle cell disease (SCD) and thalassemia.
For more than a decade, Dr. Hulihan has been a trusted, go-to ASH resource, advisor, and partner. The information generated from CDC’s Sickle Cell Data Collection program, which she has led and successfully expanded, has helped inform many aspects of ASH’s multifaceted SCD initiative, as well as provided valuable information to the greater sickle cell community.
“To me, public health is a larger-than-life jigsaw puzzle with lots of tiny, complex pieces that eventually fit together to solve health problems,” Dr. Hulihan said. “From the start, I’ve been interested in learning how those pieces intersect and align with each other, so that everyone is working together to find and implement systemic, community-level solutions.”
Fun Fact: “I love art, art history, textiles, and design. Before deciding on public health, I wanted to figure out a career that would allow me to straddle the worlds of architecture and interior design.”
