E-Insight

October 2004

ERHS Professor Receives Association Honor

Dr. Kenneth D. Blehm, a Professor in the Department of Environmental and Radiological Health Sciences, is the recipient of the 2004 Milton M. Miller Award for Outstanding Environmental Health from the Colorado Environmental Health Association.

"One of the most gratifying aspects of a career in a given field is to have your peers validate your points of view and recognize you for your contributions to the field of practice,” said Dr. Blehm. “It is personally gratifying when many of these current peers whose respect you have gained are the ‘adult’ versions of those same students you have had the opportunity to train and then observe in professional practice. How can I not be pleased with my life work when I have the privilege of seeing the accomplishments of others to whom I had the privilege of introducing environmental health? I am truly a lucky, lucky, lucky person.”

Dr. Blehm currently holds a joint appointment as Associate Dean of Undergraduate Education at the College level, and he supports industrial hygiene teaching and research at the department level. His research interests are in the areas of noise exposure assessment, noise control, program assessment and human factors (behavior-based safety and error correction). Included in his past accomplishments are enhancement of the undergraduate environmental health program and internships plus inroads in distance education; control of reverberant noise in public and school facilities through assessment and followed by controls provided by site personnel; and the use of behavior-based safety concepts to address errors leading to near misses or similar outcomes in the workplace.

Milton M. Miller was a Public Health Officer in the 1930s and 1940s. He specialized in dairy plant inspections and dairy pasteurization operations. He developed the model dairy code for the state of Colorado. After World War II, he went to work for Denver University, where he established a school for environmental health training (no longer in existence).