Abstract
Dr. Kenneth Riley McLeroy passed away in College Station, Texas, on Wednesday, May 27, 2020. His passing is mourned by family, friends, students, and colleagues alike. Born and raised in Tyler, Texas, Ken demonstrated a unique intellectual curiosity even in his youth, reading existentialist literature and exploring philosophy. This curiosity, his remarkable intellect, as well as his intellectual humility would characterize him throughout his life.
Ken earned a BS in psychology and sociology from the University of Houston in 1967. He then obtained an MS in social psychology from the University of Oklahoma. Ken opposed the war in Vietnam and chose to join the Peace Corps. He spent 1969 and 1970 in Bolivia doing community development and tuberculosis control, and making friendships that would last a lifetime. His experiences in Bolivia shaped his thinking throughout his career. When his Peace Corps service ended, he was drafted into the U.S. Army. Making good use of his education and training, the Army stationed Ken at McAfee Army Hospital at White Sands Missile Range as a mental hygiene and social work specialist.
Following his Army service, Ken moved to North Carolina and worked for 10 years at Research Triangle Institute (RTI), where he directed multiple large-scale program evaluations in the United States and in developing countries abroad. It was at RTI that he began a productive career of federally funded research, spanning issues including stroke prevention and care, sanitation, community development, health systems and infrastructure, substance use disorders, and workforce diversity. While working in research, Ken also returned to academia, studying program evaluation at North Carolina State University and ultimately earning Doctor of Philosophy in Health Education from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, where he further cultivated his interested in evaluation of community change processes.
In 1983, Dr. McLeroy took his first faculty position as an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina Greensboro. While there, he quickly established himself as a productive scholar, influential teacher, and a leader in the profession through his service to many local, state, national, and professional organizations.
From Greensboro, Dr. McLeroy returned to Oklahoma where he accepted an appointment as professor and chair of health promotion sciences at the University of Oklahoma College of Public Health in 1994, where he served for 5 years. During this time, he led a host of projects focused on community-based health promotion and program evaluation. Dr. McLeroy was especially fond of the work he was able to do with Native American tribes during his time in the Oklahoma Prevention Research Center for Native Americans, funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
In addition to being named the Samuel Roberts Noble Foundation Presidential Professor at the University of Oklahoma, he co-chaired the Association of Schools and Programs of Public Health Behavioral and Social Science workgroup for the master’s degree in public health core competencies. A long-standing member and contributor to the Society of Public Health Education, McLeroy is described by Chief Executive Officer Elaine Auld and President Dr. Cam Escoffery (personal communication, June 2020) as a dynamic thought leader and visionary in the behavioral sciences who paved the way for significant advances in health education theory, research and practice. . . . Perhaps one of his most valued legacies is helping to organize the first convening of researchers and practitioners to establish a research agenda for health education.
He was among the 33 founders of the American Academy of Health Behavior (AAHB) in 1997, and was recognized in 2010 as the AAHB Research Laureate, which is the highest member honor awarded by the academy.
Perhaps Dr. McLeroy’s most profound impact on the world was his early development of the social ecological model and its subsequent permeation throughout public health research and practice. He was renowned by colleagues around the world in the use of social ecology as a framework for public health; this catalyzed a global paradigm shift within the discipline, from a focus primarily on individual-level behavior change to intervention in organizations, communities, systems, and environments. His groundbreaking work, the socioecological model (McLeroy et al., 1988), is taught to every public health student in the United States and serves as a basis for systems approaches to public health. Even decades later, Dr. McLeroy continued thinking about and further refining these ideas as he taught the next generation of public health scholars. He was keenly interested in understanding communities as complex systems and population-level health intervention within communities, which he passed along to those he mentored both formally and informally.
Dr. McLeroy served on a number of scientific boards and review committees, including grant review panels for the CDC, National Cancer Institute, National Center for Research Resources, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, United Kingdom Medical Research Council, Canadian Institutes for Health Research, Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research, and others. He was elected to the governing council of the American Public Health Association in 2006. In addition to serving that term, he served on the editorial board for the American Journal of Public Health (AJPH), department editor of the AJPH’s Framing Health Matters, and other editorial roles with leading public health-related journals such as Health Education Research: Theory and Practice, Journal of Primary Prevention, American Journal of Health Promotion, and Health Education & Behavior.
Dr. McLeroy spent the last two decades at Texas A&M, where he helped build the school of public health as a professor and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs. He was designated as a Regents Professor in 2010 in recognition of his exemplary contributions to the Texas A&M University System and the people of Texas, and in 2013 appointed as a Distinguished Professor by the Texas A&M Health Science Center. While at Texas A&M, Dr. McLeroy served as principal investigator (PI) of two rounds of Prevention Research Center funding from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and served as PI on the National Institutes of Health–funded Program for Rural Minority Health Disparities Research. He was co-founder and co-PI of the Board of Regents–approved Center for Community Health Development. His research interests included community capacity, community-based approaches to health promotion and disease prevention, program evaluation of individual and community assets and resources, the relationship between theory and practice, social ecology, and history of public health. Even after his retirement in 2018, he continued to be active in research and service, staying on as an associate editor with the AJPH. He was a scholar to his core, and retirement did not inhibit that.
The field of public health itself is different today because of Dr. McLeroy’s research, practice, education, and service. Scholars in the field can attest to his intellect and his ability to synthesize complex ideas and apply them to social problems. People who worked around him recognized his influential leadership—though unconventional at times—to keep organizations, communities, and the field moving forward. But those of us that were fortunate enough to know Ken personally knew these qualities in a compassionate introvert with a tough exterior and a soft heart. He held space and offered opportunities, made connections, and promoted those he led. Ken thrived on deep thinking and dialogue, which pushed those around him to do more of both. Maya Angelou (2020) stated, “If you’re going to live, leave a legacy. Make a mark on the world that can’t be erased.” Although we grieve his loss, we also celebrate Ken’s legacy, his remarkable impact as an extraordinary thinker, scholar, teacher, leader, mentor, colleague, and friend.
