PHILADELPHIA — He lives in Philadelphia and his office overlooks a parking lot in suburban Montgomery County, but Glenn Sterner's roots and his work are rural.
Sterner, an assistant professor of criminal justice at Penn State Abington, was given the 2022 Rural Health Hero of the Year Award by the Pennsylvania Office of Rural Health for his work on the opioid epidemic, human trafficking, and other issues across the state. While Philadelphia's Kensington neighborhood is an opioid epicenter visited by journalists from across the globe, some rural counties in the state have had higher overdose rates, per capita in recent years.
"It's a little bit more hidden," Sterner said in a recent interview at his office. "In rural places, your neighbor down the road, a mile away, might be dealing with this and you don't know. It's also much more stigmatized."
