NEWS RELEASE

ASysT Awards 2008 Prize to CDC – NIH Team

Arlington, VA - The Applied Systems Thinking Institute (ASysT), a division of Analytic Services Inc. announced the System Dynamics Collaborative for Disease Control and Prevention as the winner of the inaugural ASysT Prize. The nine member team, listed below, was comprised of staff from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and several contractors.

• Bobby Milstein, Ph.D., MPH, CDC
• Jack Homer, Ph.D., Homer Consulting
• Gary Hirsch, Ph.D., Independent Consultant
• Diane Orenstien, Ph.D., CDC
• Patty Mabry, Ph.D., NIH
• Joyce Essien, MD., MBA, CDC
• Kristina Wile, Sustainability Institute
• Drew Jones, Sustainability Institute
• Doc Klein, Unchartered Territories, Inc.

Beginning in 2002, the System Dynamics Collaborative for Disease Control and Prevention (SD-CDC) team designed and coordinated a series of collaborative ventures within the CDC and NIH to expand the dynamic dimensions of public health policy analysis. The team’s role was to identify and inspire innovations in public health situations where there are multiple interacting epidemics. Working closely with subject matter experts (SME) and other stakeholders, the team demonstrated the practical value of analyzing public health threats individually and in combination, by relying on methodologies that were developed specifically for understanding change and governing movement in dynamic social systems. The award acknowledged 11 system modeling projects on topics such as diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular health, reproductive health, urban health, and national health system change as well as efforts to educate the CDC and NIH communities.

The size of the problems addressed, combined with the diversity of the SD-CDC team and their long track record of practical engagements were decisive factors in the selection.

“CDC is delighted about the Systems Dynamics Collaborative for Disease Control and Prevention team selection as award recipients for the Applied Systems Thinking Prize,” said Bradley Perkins, M.D., M.B.A., CDC’s Chief Strategy and Innovation Officer. “We are also extremely proud of the team’s contribution. Their work is invaluable in helping to educate the public health workforce about health systems and policies that are key in improving the health of our nation."

This year’s ASysT prize winner was chosen by an external review panel chaired by Dr. Paul Kaminski, PhD, Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Technology, Dr. Anita Jones, PhD, Professor of Engineering & Applied Science, University of Virginia and Dr. Norman Neureiter PhD, Senior Adviser, Center for Science, Technology & Security Policy, American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

The ASysT Prize is an annual award for a significant accomplishment achieved through the application of systems thinking to a problem of US national significance in the area of national security, homeland security, energy, environment, health care or education. Nominations for the award are evaluated based on the significance of the problem, the quality of systems thinking, the impact of the accomplishment, and the contribution of the nominee. The 2008 Prize is a monetary award of $20,000. The team elected to donate to the CDC Foundation, an independent, nonprofit organization that forges partnerships between CDC and others to fight threats to health and safety.

Systems thinking is an analytical approach that addresses a system and its associated external context as a whole that cannot be analyzed solely through reduction of the system to its component parts. In Systems thinking one sees, and assesses, both the “forest and the trees”.

About Analytic Services Inc.

Analytic Services is a not-for-profit public service institute dedicated to informing decisions that shape the nation’s future. We provide objective studies and analyses for the national security, homeland security, and other select public policy communities. Capabilities are delivered through our ANSER operating unit, the Applied Systems Thinking (ASysT) Institute, and the Homeland Security Studies and Analysis Institute, a federally funded research and development center, operated on behalf of the Department of Homeland Security.

About ASysT

Established in 2007, ASysT is a collaborative endeavor of Analytic Services. ASysT was created out of a mutually recognized need to apply systems thinking principles to problems of national significance while simultaneously developing an educational enterprise for all levels of leadership, as well as practitioners, throughout the national security, homeland security, intelligence, and broader policy communities.