Cheryl Vince Whitman, senior vice president of EDC and director of Health and Human Development Programs, has been passionately committed to building the organization's work over the past 28 years. She has experience in all facets of HHD's work: program design and management, materials and curriculum development, training and technical assistance, communications, and research and evaluation.

Ms.Vince Whitman initially joined EDC to conduct a major national evaluation of a new social studies curriculum, Exploring Human Nature, and then went on to direct Project Burn Prevention, a five-year research project examining the patterns of burn injuries to different age groups and evaluating the impact of a media campaign and a school/community intervention on both public knowledge about prevention and on actual rates of hospitalized burn injuries. Through this work, she began what has now become HHD's much-expanded focus on injury, violence, and suicide prevention.

In the late seventies, Ms. Vince Whitman also became deeply involved in EDC's school health work, leading the development of the Teenage Health Teaching Modules curriculum. Her interest in school health extends to the global level, founded in the knowledge that health is integral to learning and that schools are often an ideal setting in which to promote health, not only for students and staff, but also for the entire community. As director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Center to Promote Health Through Schools and Communities at HHD, she has authored many publications on effective strategies to promote health through schools and is developing capacity-building tools for ministries of education and health to advance their efforts. HHD's Rapid Assessment and Action Planning Process tools have been used in Costa Rica, Indonesia, and Nigeria.

Ms. Vince-Whitman's other areas of interest include the design of large national resources centers in HHD that enable state and local agencies, policymakers and practitioners to draw from the extensive science and research base to improve the programs they implement daily. Many of these centers address the issues of alcohol and other drug prevention, as well as violence and suicide prevention. The design of these centers has been based on extensive research of the processes in diffusion of innovation and technology transfer, using a variety of methods in professional development and organizational capacity-building to apply research to strengthen practice. Finally, Ms. Vince-Whitman has played an instrumental role in launching professional development projects for health care providers to address prevention of sexually transmitted diseases, cancer prevention, geriatric care, immunization, and adolescent risk behaviors.