The 2022 ARP President’s & Merit Awards

Dr. Hannan received her undergraduate degree at the University of California, Berkeley, a Master of Public Health at Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, Conn., and a doctorate in epidemiology at Boston University School of Medicine.

“We all stand on the shoulders of giants in our field,” Dr. Hannan notes, and she offers her heartfelt thanks to ARP/ACR members from whom she has learned so much about science and received helpful feedback. Most importantly, she applauds the combined efforts within the ACR that have brought rheumatology research forward.

Addie Thomas Service Award

The 2022 Addie Thomas Service Award is presented to an ARP member in honor of the Association’s first president and recognizes active volunteers in arthritis-related activities. This year’s recipient is Charles G. Helmick, MD.

Dr. Helmick graduated in 1972 from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and in 1976 from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Baltimore. After training in internal medicine, he joined the Epidemic Intelligence Service (the disease detective training program) at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). There he worked on exotic infectious diseases in international settings before switching his focus to chronic diseases as the bigger health problem. Dr. Helmick worked part time in the Atlanta VA Rheumatology Clinic for 12 years, where he learned more about rheumatic diseases firsthand. He retired as a captain in the U.S. Public Health Service in 2009 and from the civil service with the CDC in 2021.

When Dr. Helmick’s effort to address aging-related problems got little traction at the CDC in the early 1990s, he switched his focus to the most salable of those public health problems—arthritis. Working with former ARHP President Teresa Brady, the Arthritis Foundation, the ACR/ARHP and other partners, he helped develop the National Arthritis Action Plan: A Public Health Strategy. This document provided support for Congress’ first funding for the CDC’s Arthritis Program in 1999.

Since then, the CDC Arthritis Program has worked to provide basic and more advanced national-, state- and county-level measures of the public health impact of arthritis and other rheumatic conditions and to raise their visibility as health problems. The program also worked to develop and promote evidence-based but underused interventions, such as self-management education and physical activity, reaching hundreds of thousands of adults with arthritis.

He also worked to do the same for lupus by establishing registries in 2003 across the U.S. Because pain is a key symptom of these conditions, later in his career he began to work with national organizations to address pain as a major public health issue and arthritis as a major cause of pain. Arthritis and (separately) pain are now addressed in key national planning documents, such as the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Healthy People objectives.