A Beautiful Mind

Janine Jagger ’72 has been named one of 24 MacArthur Fellows for 2002 for her work in protecting health-care workers from the transmission of bloodborne diseases.

Janine, 52, an epidemiologist, is the Becton Dickinson Professor of Health Care Worker Safety at the University of Virginia, where she founded and directs the International Health Care Worker Safety Center within the School of Medicine.

As early as 1985, she began to study the incidence of needlestick injuries and transmission of disease among health-care workers, collecting raw data from hospitals and other health agencies—the government kept no statistics on such cases—to assess psychological damage as well as the transmission of AIDS, hepatitis, and other bloodborne diseases. By the early 1990s, she and a team of researchers had determined that needlestick injuries were less the fault of careless medical personnel than of poorly designed needles and other common clinical tools. Her team now holds patents on six newly designed tools for obtaining blood. She also directed development of the Exposure Prevention Information Network (EPINet), an on-line tracking system for health-care worker exposure data, subscribed to by more than 1,500 American and foreign hospitals.

Janine was instrumental in passage of the Needlestick Safety and Prevention Act (2000), an amendment and update to the bloodborne pathogen standards of a 1970 Occupational Health and Safety Administration law.

At Moravian, she majored in psychology. She also holds a Master of Public Health degree from the University of Pittsburgh (1974) and a Ph.D. in epidemiology (1987) from the University of Virginia, where she has been a member of the medical school faculty since 1978.
Her honors include a Distinguished Inventor Award (1988) from Intellectual Property Owners and the Henderson Inventor of the Year Award (1996) from the University of Virginia Patent Foundation, as well as an Excellence in Research Award (1998) from the Association of Operating Room Nurses.

That invention trait of hers may be genetic. Her great-grandfather, William Arthur Stewart, patented a submarine detector in 1917.
She is married to another member of the medical faculty, Patrice Guyenet, who is French. They live in Charlottes-ville and have two children.