Sandra Lane blushed as she described the public health award that she was honored with in November.

“I’m sorry,” she said, smiling down at her feet. Even from this angle, her face is warm and kind. “Something about this award just makes me nervous.”

She’s modest, but winning the American Public Health Association’s 2015 Henrik L. Blum Award for Excellence in Health Policy was no small feat for the Syracuse University professor. Her shelves are packed with books she wrote and numerous other awards, a sign she’s more than worthy. She’s worked on countless projects, and is now developing the Trauma Response Team along with its director, Timothy Jennings-Bey.

While Lane doesn’t brag about what she’s done for the city of Syracuse herself, Jennings-Bey insists she is the “fairy godmother” of the community.

Jennings-Bey and Lane have collaborated on research as early as 1996, but around 2008, they started research on what they call “street addiction.”

The concept is that the streets have an addictive, cyclical nature — cocaine, alcohol, gambling, violence — and their research shows that those who are exposed to this culture need rehabilitation to get better.

They’re now working on a project called the Trauma Response Team, which revolves around the idea that those who grow up in city slums experience much of the same trauma that soldiers do in war-torn areas.

Jennings-Bay started the Trauma Response Team with the idea that his team would travel to places where a traumatic event has occurred, and attempt to lessen its consequences. Later, he teamed up with Lane and SU to conduct more research and make their counseling more effective.

Lane and her team of SU faculty and students head to “gunshot cluster areas” and offer psychometric screenings to community members. By asking a series of questions about quality of life, the team can evaluate childhood behavior issues, depression, anxiety and how traumatized people are.

The questions produce surprising results: Over half of those screened scored positive for PTSD, and the vast majority knew 10 or more individuals who had been murdered, Lane said.

Timothy Andrew Bryant, one of Lane’s advisees and a 2015 SU alumnus, helped conduct research for the Trauma Response Team. Despite growing up in the Brooklyn area — which he said has its own battle with poverty and violence — the information he learned through the project was sometimes hard to digest.

He also said he’s confident that the work Lane and Jennings-Bey are doing is crucial not just for the city of Syracuse, but to help understand structural violence everywhere. And even though he’s no longer Lane’s student, Bryant plans to continue working with the program.

Jennings-Bey reiterated that Lane is more of a blessing to Syracuse than people recognize.

“A lot of times people from the university circuit feel indifferent or look down at people who come from this community, and the fairy godmother is having none of that,” Jennings-Bey said. “Sandy is kind of that breath of fresh air.”

In addition to the major research projects she conducted with Jennings-Bey, Lane was also the founding director of the undergraduate public health program at the university and created Syracuse Healthy Start, an infant mortality reduction program that’s run through the city of Syracuse.

Despite all of her projects, public health wasn’t always on Lane’s mind.

When she left home at 18, she studied to become a nurse. But in 1973, the United States underwent a social adjustment: Roe v. Wade was passed, a landmark Supreme Court case that made abortion legal in the United States.

Lane soon realized how difficult it was to balance classes, pay rent and nurse part-time. After that initial semester, she could no longer afford classes and she dropped out.

At age 31, Lane graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, but she had fallen in love with learning and decided to seek other degrees.

“Once I started going, I just kept going,” she said.

Lane went on to earn her doctorate in medical anthropology, and two master’s degrees in public health.

Shortly after, she married Robert Rubinstein, a fellow anthropologist and professor at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. The couple moved to Cairo, Egypt, where she worked on her doctoral dissertation.

When she returned to the U.S., Lane looked at much of what she had learned in the Middle East and realized that urban areas in America experienced much of the same poverty and discrimination. She used the knowledge she had garnered and facilitated project after project to better communities such as Syracuse.

“If you ask what projects are significant, say, about me, or other colleagues, they’ll name two or three,” her husband said. “If you take a look at Sandy’s career chronologically, she has been instrumental in facilitating so many different projects.”

But for Lane, it’s not a matter of completing as many projects as possible. It’s a matter of helping as many people as possible, regardless of the hurdles in her way.

For now, she’s working on the Trauma Response Team — but it won’t be long until she’s on to something new.

“My work is not just purely theoretical or academic, it’s very practical,” Lane said. “In some cases, with the help of others, it can lead to some really good things happening in this city.”

Published on February 1, 2016 at 9:14 pm

Contact: ararcham@syr.edu