Peek-Asa to deliver 37th Presidential Lecture

Corinne Peek-Asa, associate dean for research for the University of Iowa College of Public Health and professor in the Department of Occupational and Environmental Health, will deliver Iowa’s 37th annual Presidential Lecture on Feb. 16, 2020.

Corinne Peek-Asa

“Professor Peek-Asa is an ideal choice to present the Presidential Lecture, with her vibrant research program in traumatic injury and violence prevention, her outstanding teaching and mentorship, and her notable cross-disciplinary collaborations in the public health practice community,” says UI President J. Bruce Harreld. “She will perfectly fulfill the main goal of the Presidential Lecture: to share the most distinguished work by the University of Iowa’s best faculty with a wider audience. I look forward to joining the community in what promises to be an engaging and enlightening lecture.”

Peek-Asa’s area of expertise is injury and violence prevention, and she coordinates collaboration between more than 66 faculty and staff in the UI’s CDC-funded Injury Prevention Research Center (IPRC). She has conducted research in the areas of global road traffic safety, interpersonal violence, workplace violence, residential fire injuries, poisoning, and acute care. She is trained as an epidemiologist, and her expertise focuses on implementing and translating programs and policies to reduce the burden of injuries. Her work reaches from Iowa communities to collaborations around the world. For example, she directs an NIH-funded Trauma Training Program builds research capacity in Romania, Armenia, Georgia, and Moldova, and that provides opportunities for UI students to study abroad.

Peek-Asa received a BS in biochemistry from the University of New Mexico and a Master’s in Public Health and PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles. She was on the faculty in the Department of Epidemiology at UCLA before joining the Iowa faculty in 2001.

Peek-Asa is also the past president of the Society for the Advancement of Violence and Injury Research and received that organization’s President’s Award in 2011. She was named a 2009 ResearchAmerica! Public Health Hero and received the UI May Brodbeck Distinguished Achievement Award in 2017. She is a member of the National Academies Global Violence Prevention Forum and in 2013 was appointed by the U.S. Secretary of Transportation to the Transportation Research Board.

The Presidential Lecture series provides an opportunity for distinguished faculty members to present significant aspects of their work to the greater university community and general public. The university established the annual series to encourage intellectual communication among the many disciplines that constitute the UI, as well as to provide a public forum for scholarship, research, and creative achievement. The series is made possible by the generosity of donors of unrestricted gifts to the UI Center for Advancement.