Faculty & Staff

From the Dean

This time of year seems to move in fast-forward. One minute new students are finding their way around campus; the next, they are hunkering down for mid-terms. But as I talk with faculty, staff, and leaders from around the School, I know that students are not the only busy ones.

That industriousness is clear just by looking at the events on the School's calendar for this academic year—the short list includes the Global Public Health Conference starting this weekend, our exciting Curriculum Renewal plans—which was rolled out publicly yesterday on an ASPH webinar, the selection of our junior faculty Calderone Prize recipients, and our upcoming Grand Rounds on issues of corrections health systems and their lessons for next-generation health systems. Thanks to your vision and accomplishments, the School is creating an ever-larger footprint in the public health field.

As you know, the School has identified five goals to accomplish over the next few years. For the past two years, we have been working on defining these goals, and now we must focus on developing and sustaining them. The good news is that we are making steady progress toward bringing them to fruition.

As they are the cornerstone of our planning for the next two to three years, I did want to take a moment to restate our five goals and update you on progress in these areas. Read more >>

New Faces

Amit Kapoor joined the Center for Infection & Immunity as an Assistant Professor of Clinical Pathology and Cell Biology in August 2010. Amit will work with novel viruses, determining their disease association, developing sensitive and accurate diagnostic assays, and identifying the viruses' host cell tropisms. He will also design studies to prevent new infections and diseases.

Amit had been an Associate Research Scientist for the Center for Infection & Immunity prior to his appointment as Assistant Professor. Before that, he was a staff scientist in molecular virology at the Blood Systems Research Institute of the University of California, San Francisco.

Amit received his PhD in pathogen discovery and surveillance and molecular virology from the Sanjay Gandhi Postgraduate Institute of Medical Sciences in India and his MS in microbiology from Jiwaji University in Gwalior, India.

Kudos

Here's a snapshot of promotions, honors, and achievements some of our faculty members have recently earned. If we overlooked you, please contact us.

Promoted

Melissa Begg, Vice Dean for Education

Amy Fairchild, Professor of Sociomedical Sciences

Appointed/Elected

Patrick Kinney, Professor of Environmental Health Sciences, was named to a new interdisciplinary team at Columbia University selected by the U.S. Department of Commerce and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to assess climate-related challenges and risks along the urban corridor between Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. The team is one of six regional consortiums, part of NOAA's Climate Program.

David Rosner, Ronald H. Lauterstein Professor of Sociomedical Sciences and Professor of History, was elected to the Institute of Medicine. The new members and foreign associates were announced at the 40th annual meeting on October 11. Being elected to the IOM is one of the highest honors in the fields of health and medicine.

Milestones

ICAP surpasses 1 million. Click here to see a slideshow about their work.

Andy Davidson: Scholar, Mentor, Humorist, Style Maven, Mensch

Bookshelf

Columbia University professor Lourdes Hernandez-Cordero and Dean Emeritus Allan Formicola have co-edited a new book, Mobilizing the Community for Better Health: What the Rest of America Can Learn from Northern Manhattan. The book shares the methods and ideas of the Northern Manhattan Community Voices Collaborative, which served as a bridge between Columbia and the surrounding community. The Collaborative partnered with churches and community organizations to improve access to primary care, nutritional improvement, and smoking cessation. "Mobilizing the Community" tracks the collaborative's successes and failures and gives voice to the staff members of the organizations that participated. By so doing, the book outlines an important role for universities and community groups in improving an area's well-being. This is a valuable story for all those with an interest in public health.

Lourdes Hernandez-Cordero is an Assistant Professor of Clinical Sociomedical Sciences at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health. She directs the Center for Youth Violence Prevention's CLIMB (City Life is Moving Bodies) project, which works with northern Manhattan-based organizations to promote youth development, physical activity, stewardship, and social capital through community mobilization.

Allan Formicola is Dean Emeritus and Professor Emeritus of the Columbia University College of Dental Medicine and founder of the University's Center for Community Health Partnerships, which has now merged with the Center for Family and Community Medicine.

On Campus

In the Neighborhood

Website Watch

Grand Rounds on the Future of Public Health (Nov. 10, 4 - 5:30 PM)

Corrections Health: A System Where Public Health and Medicine Intersect

Don't miss the opportunity to peer inside the walls of the New York State prison health system with our next Grand Rounds lecturer, Lester Wright, MD, MPH, Deputy Commissioner & Chief Medical Officer (Retired), New York State Department of Correctional Services. He will be joined by the Assistant Commissioner for Health Services, Elizabeth Ritter, RN.

Dr. Wright devoted 15 years to transforming the medical arm of the state Corrections Services into a more integrated system that provides inmates with quality healthcare while supporting a holistic approach to corrections. His work has drawn international attention. In fact, Dr. Wright will soon move to Australia to work on improving prison health in South Australia.

"Prison health does not stand alone," says Dr. Wright, Distinguished Lecturer, City University of New York School of Public Health at Hunter College. It works in tandem with security and has touch points at all levels of the healthcare systems from individual medical specialists to regional hospitals to the distribution of pharmaceuticals.

Join us in Alumni Auditorium on November 10 to hear Dr. Wright discuss milestones in corrections health—telemedicine, smoking cessation, family planning, and in preventing and treating HIV/AIDS, hepatitis, and tuberculosis—and explore opportunities for collaboration and research at the intersection of public health and corrections.

Communications Announcements

MEDIA TRAINING: Are you ready for your close-up on CNN or 60 Minutes? Want to polish up your presentation style for speeches, media interviews, or panel discussions? On November 10 at noon in Hess Commons, our TV-savvy alumna and board member Perri Peltz (pictured left) will be offering Media Training 101 for faculty. Perri will offer tips on how to get your key points across more effectively, what to wear, and how to redirect an awkward question. Register here.

EXPERTS GUIDE: One of the most widely used areas on the School website is our Experts Guide, which lists faculty members and their areas of expertise. Prospective students use it to see who teaches here. Journalists use it to find expert sources for their articles. Unfortunately, our experts guide is about three years out of date, and we need your help to make it current.

To do so, we ask that EVERY full-time FACULTY MEMBER take 10-20 minutes to login here (using your uni) and update your expert guide entry. Please check off topics on which you have significant expertise. These should be subjects that you could knowledgeably discuss with a reporter. If you do not already have a faculty profile, you will be prompted to complete that first.

Note: We also need help updating our list of expertise topics. Topics such as H1N1, Hurricane Katrina, PTSD, and epigenetics were not on the original list. At the bottom of the list on the fourth page is a place to add new topics in which you are an expert. Please update your entry by Friday, October 30th.

Questions? Please contact Stephanie Berger, 5-4372, sb2247@columbia.edu, or Anne Foulke, 2-5312, af2231@columbia.edu.

Dean's Science Series

By Melissa Begg, Vice Dean for Education

This year's School Assemblies will include the Dean's Science Series, comprised of presentations by faculty from a variety of departments and disciplines, modeled after the interdisciplinary program series presented last year.

Like last year's series, the presentations will be very brief (10 minutes or so), highlighting major issues and challenges. Faculty will focus on areas of discovery and application from across the School that emphasize key elements of the School's mission and strategic plan – both the "whats" (e.g., children's health, global health, humans rights, chronic disease, climate and health, aging) and the "hows" (e.g., life course approach, systems thinking, interdisciplinarity, multilevel analysis, and intervention).

The goal of the lectures is to raise awareness of the scope and breadth of Mailman School of Public Health programs, and to generate more cross-departmental conversation around these issues. Through this series, we might find more areas of commonality than expected.

Valuing Teaching

By Andrew Davidson, Executive Vice Dean

Changing Landscape of Global Health Conference (Oct. 24-26)

Why this conference? Why here, why now, and how can you participate? Alastair Ager, Executive Director of the School's Global Health Initiative, offers some answers about the conference, which the School is co-convening with the London School of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene and the Association of Schools of Public Health.

1.  What's unusual about this global health conference, as opposed to others held in the past?

The very strong southern representation (over 30 countries) makes it genuinely global in scope; and this diversity of perspective is being used to develop a uniquely robust 'map' of the way the world is changing vis-à-vis health needs. As a result, strategies can be determined through a comprehensive rather than a partial—in both senses of the word—analysis. Read more >>>

Select Upcoming Events

Now through Nov. 30 – ICAP's AIDS In Africa: Images of Hope
Low Library Rotunda (Morningside Campus)

Fri., Oct. 22 - Pakistan Floods: Prevention and Preparedness to Guide Humanitarian Action in Future Crises
10:00 - 12:00 pm; 8th Floor Rosenfield Auditorium (722 West 168th St.)

Sun., Oct. 24 - An Evening to Honor and Advance the Vision of Allan Rosenfield (by invitation only)
5:00 - 7:00 pm; Morningside Campus

Mon., Oct. 25 - Tues., Oct 26 - Changing Landscape of Global Public Health (by invitation only)
Video of highlights will be streamed online. Details to come.
8:00 am - 5:00 pm; Morningside Campus

Thurs., Nov. 4 - OSHA at Forty: Rethinking Worker Protection for the 21st Century?
The Annual Isidore I. Benrubi Lecture
4:00 - 6:00 pm; Neurological Institute Auditorium (710 West 168th St.)

Mon., Nov. 8 - Alumni and Friends Reception in conjunction with APHA's 138th Annual Meeting & Exposition
Please RSVP here.
6:30 - 8:00 pm; Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO

Wed., Nov 10 - Media Training with Perri Peltz
Please RSVP here.
12:00 pm; Hess Commons (Rosenfield Building)

Wed., Nov. 10 - Corrections Health: A System Where Public Health and Medicine Intersect
Grand Rounds on the Future of Public Health
4:00 - 5:30 pm; Alumni Auditorium (650 W. 168th St.)

Mon., Nov. 15 - Longer Lives in Aging Society: Needs, Opportunities, and Creating Win-Wins
University Lecture given by Dean Linda P. Fried
Please RSVP by Nov. 5 to events2@columbia.edu or call 212-851-7422.
6:15 pm; Low Library Rotunda (Morningside Campus)

Tues., Nov. 16 - School Assembly
12:00 - 1:30 pm; 8th Floor Auditorium (Rosenfield Building)

For more events and to notify the community about an upcoming event that you are organizing, visit the events calendar online.