May 30, 2025 | Erin Bluvas, bluvase@sc.edu

Roger Sargent may have a background in biology, but he found his passion in public health. His Ph.D. program first introduced him to the field – a focus on human parasitology that brought him to USC’s biology department in 1968.

“At that point, parasites were very prominent in the economically disadvantaged areas of South Carolina and disproportionately impacted people in rural communities,” says Sargent.

Concerned about this pressing public health issue, Sargent teamed up with his biology advisor, Felix Lauter, on a large grant to study two different parasites plaguing minority communities in the state. Sargent later received his own grant from Janssen Pharmaceutica, a division of Johnson and Johnson, to study the efficacy of their new drug, Mebendazole, to treat Trichuris trichiura, an intestinal worm that infects the large bowel. Sargent’s work led to the FDA approval of the Mebendazole, which remains the drug of choice to treat individuals infected with this parasite.

“This experience piqued my interest in public health,” Sargent says. “Not only did I see the impact of parasites on individuals during my onsite visits, but I also observed major nutritional deficiencies and other health problems in this population.”

After completing his Ph.D. in 1971, Sargent was hired by USC’s Office of Research and helped secure funding for the Multiple Risk Factor Intervention Trial (MRFIT). This large, randomized control trial focused on cardiovascular disease risk factors like smoking, high cholesterol and hypertension. Twenty other major research universities and clinical centers across the country had competed for inclusion in this grant, and USC’s College of Health and Physical Education was honored to be one of the recipients. 

Sargent was then asked to serve as assistant dean for the College – home to health education and physical education, the latter of which included pedagogy, exercise physiology, and motor development focus areas. He later served as acting dean.

In 1974, the new School of Public Health (named for Norman J. Arnold in 2000) was approved by the state legislature and S.C. Commission on Higher Education. Preparations for the school’s 1975 launch were well underway, with Rolf Lynton joining USC that fall to serve as the inaugural dean.

For Sargent and the other faculty members in the College of Health and Physical Education who had worked on MRFIT and other population-level research, it became increasingly clear that this type of work was better aligned with the mission of the School of Public Health. It took several years of debate, advocacy, and persuasion before the health education faculty became a part of the School of Public Health, which had just appointed biologist Winona Vernberg as its dean.

Sargent joined Gale Coston as associate dean to Vernberg. Together, they helped facilitate the transition of several of Sargent’s former colleagues from the College of Health and Physical Education into the Arnold School in 1989 to form the Department of Exercise Science. Physical education migrated to the College of Education.

Vernberg's vision for the school aligned with Sargent's and his like-minded colleagues, who saw their research-oriented disciplines as a better fit with a School of Public Health. This held true in terms of overlapping interests and expertise as well as being a more visible platform for funding opportunities from agencies like the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“I just knew the School of Public Health was where health education could thrive,” Sargent says of what became known as the Department of Health Education, Promotion, and Behavior (HPEB). “Health education is a core component of public health, and we understood even then that health education meant fostering creative action through creative venues.”

Over the years, HPEB evolved to include organizing communities and individuals to promote health and many other interdisciplinary areas applying social and behavioral sciences. Sargent says that the department’s growth began with support from both Vernberg and Coston. Both were champions for the discipline, the creation of faculty positions and additional degree programs.

Sargent spent the remainder of his career in the HPEB department. His favorite part? Working with doctoral students.

This was something that he was only able to do in a limited capacity previously, but health education’s new home in the School of Public Health enabled the department to offer three different paths to a doctoral degree, the Phd, DrPH, and the EdD (a collaborative degree with the College of Education). Sargent genuinely wanted to help students, intuitively understood how to train them, and prided himself on his ability to help guide them through the difficult maze of earning a doctorate. He received the Arnold School of Public Health Faculty Teaching Award in 2001 for these efforts.

Though his public health research began in infectious diseases and encompassed the cardiovascular disease risk factors addressed by the MRFIT study, Sargent continued broadening his public health expertise. After spending a sabbatical year working with nutrition researchers at Tufts University and the New England School of Medicine, Sargent returned to USC with a passion for the subject. He subsequently created and taught four different courses in nutrition and guided numerous doctoral students who were eager to advance this area of public health research.

“I trained more than two dozen doctoral students and served on many more doctoral committees throughout my career, and I always felt like I learned as much from them as they learned from me, so it was a two-way street and a wonderful experience,” says Sargent, who has followed his students’ careers and the impacts they have made. “My profession was without question rewarding and intellectually stimulating and offered me purpose and joy, and I feel grateful for all of the students and faculty I had the privilege of working with."

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