Quick summary: Sheppard Kellam the public health psychiatrist whose randomised classroom trials showed early aggression control prevents adult substance abuse crime and school failure has died. His “Good Behaviour Game” trained first and second grade pupils in self regulation while giving teachers a practical tool that improved outcomes into young adulthood. The results urge education and public health leaders to embed such universal programmes in early schooling to strengthen well being and ease future pressure on mental health services and the justice system.
Sheppard G. Kellam, MD, a public health psychiatrist whose work helped establish the foundations of prevention science, has died. He was professor emeritus and former Chair of the Department of Mental Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Dr Kellam’s research spanned public health, psychiatry, randomised field trials, schools and classrooms, aggression, depression, achievement, children, life course, social fields, epidemiology, prevention research, developmental epidemiology, and public education. In partnership with the Baltimore City Public Schools System, he led three generations of large scale, epidemiologically based randomised field trials testing universal preventive interventions in first and second grade classrooms. Beginning in 1984 and continuing for decades, this work targeted the early antecedents of long-term problem outcomes, including drug and alcohol abuse and dependence disorders, daily regular tobacco use, antisocial personality disorder, delinquency and incarceration, use of school based services, and school failure. All of these outcomes share a common early risk factor: aggressive, disruptive classroom behaviour in first and second grade.
The intervention most closely associated with his name is the “Good Behaviour Game“, a classroom behaviour management method that socialises children to the role of student while giving teachers a way to manage behaviour without competing for instructional time. By young adulthood, the trials had shown significant and meaningful reductions across all of these problem outcomes, findings reported in a June 2008 supplemental issue of Drug and Alcohol Dependence. The three generations of trials were supported by NIDA, NIMH and NICHD over three decades.
Dr Kellam’s theoretical and methodological contributions began earlier still, from 1963–1982, with population based universal intervention studies in Woodlawn, an African American community on the South Side of Chicago. Working closely with a board of Woodlawn community organisation leaders, he and his colleagues coined the term developmental epidemiology, mapping the variation in developmental paths leading to health or disorder in defined populations. This became the basis of a developmental epidemiological prevention research strategy aimed precisely at early risk factors.
On moving to Baltimore in 1982, Dr Kellam chaired the Department of Mental Hygiene (now the Department of Mental Health) at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, a post he held until 1993. He was Founding Director of the NIMH Hopkins Prevention Research Center, which supported the three generations of trials, using community and school supported randomised designs to examine not only main effects but variation in impact across developmental paths and outcomes. Recognising the need to bridge public education and public health prevention research, he later moved to the American Institutes for Research (AIR), where he established the Center for Integrating Education and Prevention Research in Schools (Ed/Prev), which became home to the third generation of the Baltimore trials. After a decade at AIR, he returned to Johns Hopkins as Professor Emeritus.
His contributions were recognised widely throughout his career. In 1996 he received the Rema Lapouse Award for lifetime contributions to public health and prevention science from the Mental Health, Epidemiology, and Statistics Sections of the American Public Health Association. In 1999 the World Federation for Mental Health presented him with its Distinguished Public Mental Health Award. He was a Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association, and from 1998 to 2001 served as the first President of the Society for Prevention Research elected by its full membership. In 2004 he was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Experimental Criminology, and in 2008 he received both the Presidential Award of the Society for Prevention Research and the Director’s Special Appreciation Award from NIDA. That same year, he was honoured with a Festschrift, The Next Stage of Prevention Science, jointly presented by NIMH, NIDA and Johns Hopkins University. In 2013 he was among the first 12 members of the Society for Prevention Research elected as SPR Fellows for lifetime contributions to the field.
Shep’s impact on prevention science is immeasurable, and many who attended the SPR Annual Meetings over the years experienced that impact firsthand. His pioneering work helped establish the foundations of the field and demonstrated the power of rigorous longitudinal research to improve the lives of children, families and communities.
Beyond his scientific contributions, many will remember Shep as a generous mentor, a thoughtful colleague and a passionate advocate for prevention research. He invested deeply in people, encouraging young investigators, challenging them to think more broadly about the societal impact of their work, and helping to build the community that SPR has become today. He also served as the Society’s first President elected by the full membership, helping to shape the organisation during a formative period of its history.
For those who benefited from the generations of mentorship and leadership that Shep represented, his passing is a reminder of the responsibility to carry this work forward. Prevention science has always been built on the willingness of scholars to invest not only in research but in the people who will advance the field after them, and Shep exemplified that commitment throughout his life.
Shep leaves behind an extraordinary legacy, felt through the countless researchers he mentored, the discoveries he inspired and the lives improved by the science he helped create.
