The Letter-In-Life Award is the most prestigious honor that the Pingry Alumni Association bestows upon a graduate. It honors those who, in gaining distinction for themselves, have also brought honor to the School. Dr. Fullilove was honored during Convocation for the 2026-27 school year.
Dr. Robert E. Fullilove is a university educator, a nationally recognized scholar in public health, and a civic leader who has devoted his career to health equity and social justice. He was one of the first African American students to attend Pingry, where he was elected to Student Government and elected president of his senior class. He also studied French, leading to his fluency, which would prove helpful later in life for consultant work in France. As a sophomore at Colgate University, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy and Religion, he participated in Freedom Spring Break, organized by the YM/YWCA for college students to travel to nine cities in the south to assist with voter registration campaigns. He was assigned to Atlanta and worked at the headquarters of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He was also part of Mississippi Freedom Summer in 1964, when he helped spearhead voter registration drives for African Americans. In retrospect, he believes that simply showing up was important. Dr. Fullilove’s involvement in the Civil Rights Movement continued until 1967 as a field secretary with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
He went on to earn a Master of Science in Instructional Communication at Syracuse University and a Doctor of Education in Higher and Adult Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. He began his career in academic positions and became involved with initiatives involving minority health because HIV/AIDS was part of a health disparity, when a particular group experiences the burden of illness and access to healthcare beyond what their population numbers suggest. In this case, African Americans were associated with a significant increase in cases of HIV, so after the Civil Rights Movement, the battle against racism continued with this racialized phenomenon in public health.
By 1986, Dr. Fullilove and his wife Mindy were heavily engaged in HIV/AIDS research at the University of California, San Francisco, working at the Center for AIDS Prevention Studies. Within four years, they were publishing their research in journals and presenting at conferences on HIV/AIDS. At one conference, they met colleagues from Columbia University who told them about a similar HIV/AIDS research organization at the New York State Psychiatric Institute and at Columbia. Because Dr. Fullilove and his wife were studying a public health problem largely located in Black and Brown communities, the colleagues from Columbia suggested returning to the institution where they had received their doctorates, in a city and state with a substantially larger community of color.
Thus, Dr. Fullilove and his wife returned to New York in 1990, joining Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, where he is Associate Dean for Community and Minority Affairs, Professor of Clinical Sociomedical Sciences (the field addresses social, political, and economic factors that influence health outcomes), an adjunct full professor at Teachers College, and Co-Director of the Cities Research Group, which studies epidemics that affect poor and minority communities. He has been awarded the Distinguished Teaching Award three times (1995, 2001, 2013).
In the mid-1990s, Dr. Fullilove began writing about the impact of both the war on drugs and mass incarceration on the HIV pandemic. In 2010, he was invited to present that research to college students who were in prison through the Bard Prison Initiative. His presentation hit home and the students wanted to hear more. As a result, Bard College decided to offer public health courses in prison, with Dr. Fullilove as Senior Advisor to the newly formed Public Health Program. Since 2010, he has taught public health in New York State prisons that are part of the program, and over 500 students have studied the field, with many of them completing degrees at Ivy League universities and making contributions to society. In May 2026, to honor his founding of the program and commitment to the Bard Prison Initiative, the Bard College Board of Trustees awarded Dr. Fullilove an Honorary Doctorate.
He has also written numerous articles about minority health and served on editorial boards of medical journals as well as many other boards and committees, including the Board of Health Promotion and Disease Prevention at the Institute of Medicine (IOM) at the National Academy of Sciences, and the Advisory Committee on HIV and STD Prevention at the Centers for Disease Control. Among his many honors, Dr. Fullilove has been awarded an Honorary Doctorate from Bank Street College of Education and was named a National Associate of the National Academies of Science. In 2025, a student award in his name was established at Columbia: The Dr. Robert Fullilove Community Impact Award recognizes a graduating Sociomedical Sciences student who has demonstrated exceptional leadership and innovation in community public health work.
Through his commitment to the African American community and public health, and his distinguished teaching career, Dr. Robert E. Fullilove has earned distinction. Through this distinction, he has brought honor to The Pingry School.
Proudly presented this tenth day of September 2026.
Dr. Fullilove is pictured with Pingry Alumni Association President Kathy Sartorius ’92.
Contact: Greg Waxberg ’96, Assistant Director of Communications, Writer/Editor