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September
September 2010
From the Dean
Welcome to the first issue of Momentum! This newsletter for the Mailman School faculty and staff will help us share valuable information and news about our school and community while highlighting everyone's hard work and accomplishments.
In this inaugural issue you will meet eight impressive new members of our faculty, get some facts and figures on the incoming class of students, celebrate the successes of colleagues, and learn about some exciting changes in our neighborhood, our School buildings, and to our website. You will also find important updates on three issues of vital importance to the School: our curriculum renewal initiative, the reaccreditation process, and our mentoring program for faculty. I want to thank Sandro Galea, Ian Lapp, and Andy Davidson for providing these updates, but I also want to thank all of you for the vision and hard work that you have brought to these efforts. Read more >>
New Faces
This year we welcome eight new members of the faculty. Please help make them feel at home.
Rosalind Carter, Assistant Professor of Clinical Epidemiology
Ryan Demmer, Assistant Professor of Epidemiology
Tal Gross, Assistant Professor of Health Policy & Management
Julie Herbstman, Assistant Professor of Environmental Health Sciences
Elizabeth Jackson, Assistant Professor of Population and Family Health
← Rachel Shelton, Assistant Professor of Sociomedical Sciences
Kavita Sivaramakrishnan, Assistant Professor of Sociomedical Sciences
Lindsay Stark, Assistant Professor of Clinical Population and Family Health
Snapshot of The Incoming Class
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Total New Enrollment: 595* MPH Students: 485 Age Range: 20-60 States Represented: 36 Female/Male: 80%/20% |
Check out the new 1-minute video on arriving at the Mailman School in 2010.
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To learn more, visit Meet the Incoming Class of 2010.
*Enrollment numbers will shift when final registration data is reported in October.
On Campus
Get ready for some exciting improvements to the Allan Rosenfield building. This fall we are constructing a new front entrance for disabled persons, complete with a lift, to the left of the main entrance. We are using the opportunity to address one of the School's physical shortcomings: lack of space for people to come together, grab a cup of coffee, share a sandwich and work in a more interdisciplinary manner. Room 1054 will be renovated and then furnished with booths, tables and chairs to provide a spot for people to come together. Stand by for more information as the project gets underway.
Renovation news: the 11th, 12th and 13th floors in the Rosenfield Building are undergoing work that should be completed by January 2011. ICAP will occupy the 13th floor; Environmental Health Sciences will occupy space on floors 11 and 12.
In the Neighborhood
Every Tuesday through November 23rd, don't miss the chance to buy farm-fresh produce at the farmer's market on Fort Washington Ave. between 168th and 169th Street. The market operates from 8 am to 5 pm and is a program of the nonprofit group GrowNYC.
Website Watch
Good news! The IT group has completed phase 2 of the website redesign initiative -- the launch of the Drupal content management system. This system allows each of the School's departments, centers and business units to update its Web pages quickly and easily in real time via the Internet. Use of the system does require some basic instruction, so the IT team is providing small group training sessions throughout this fall.
If you are the Web content administrator for your group and would like to sign up for training, please e-mail Elizabeth Tashiro at es2222@columbia.edu and she will let you know the timing for the next training session. Sessions last about 1.5 hours.
The School website is continually evolving. Please check out these valuable new sections:Global Health Initiative and R2.
We are also pleased announce our arrival in the land of social media. Join us there by visiting: Facebook 
Twitter 
YouTube 
Kudos
By being thought leaders, mentors, service providers, and world-class scientists, our faculty members make a positive impact throughout the world. Here's a snapshot of promotions, honors, and achievements some of us have recently earned.
Promoted
Tiffany Gary-Webb, Associate Professor of Epidemiology
Andrea A. Howard, Associate Professor of Clinical Epidemiology (in ICAP)
Jessica E. Justman, Associate Professor of Clinical Medicine (in Epidemiology & ICAP)
Ilan Meyer, Professor of Clinical Sociomedical Sciences
Matthew S. Perzanowski, Associate Professor of Environmental Health Sciences
Jo C. Phelan, Professor of Sociomedical Sciences
Appointed/Elected
Sherry A. Glied, professor and former chair of Health Policy and Management, as Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Tom K. Hei, professor of environmental health sciences, vice chair of radiation oncology, and associate director of the Center for Radiological Research as vice president/president of the Radiation Research Society, for a three-year term, ending in 2013. He will be the fourth president of RRS from the Center for Radiological Research.
W. Ian Lipkin, John Snow Professor of Epidemiology and director of the Center for Infection and Immunity as co-chair of the CDC's National Biosurveillance Advisory Subcommittee. He serves as co-chair with Dr. Jeffrey Angle, North Carolina state health director.
The Good News On Accreditation
By Ian Lapp, assoc. dean for academic affairs and education
As we begin the new academic year, I would like to bring you up to date on the Council for Education on Public Health (CEPH) accreditation process and provide some reflections on what this assessment by our peers tells us about our collective accomplishments as a School.
First, let's review where we are in the process. Over the summer, the School received the CEPH site visit report, a 50-page document based on our self-study report (550 pages) and the site visit, which extended over three days last April. We have carefully reviewed the site visit report, and Dean Fried and I have submitted a formal response. The CEPH Board of Councilors will review all materials and will make the accreditation decision at their fall meeting, October 14-16. We will be notified of their decision shortly afterwards.
While an official ruling is still forthcoming, it is safe to say, based on the CEPH site visit report, that this was the School's most successful accreditation to date. In sum, we were graded on 27 criteria and we were in compliance on 26 and partially in compliance on one criterion. Based on the experience of our peers, we know it is rare to achieve this level of success. Read more >>
A 21st Century Curriculum for 21st Century Needs
By Sandro Galea, chair, Dept. of Epidemiology and Curriculum Renewal Task Force
For more than a year we have been engaged in a School-wide initiative to renew our MPH curriculum for Fall 2012. Dean Fried launched this initiative over a year ago and more than 150 faculty, students, and staff have since been actively involved.
A Curriculum Renewal Task Force (CRTF) was charged by Dean Fried to develop the curriculum's overarching elements. Task Force members' work has been guided by the latest literature on pedagogy, by our experience as a School, and by emerging best practices in the field. Our goal is to work with the Dean's Office to structure a renewed MPH curriculum and to launch a discussion at the School and in the broader public health community on essential attributes of a modern public health education. Read more >>
Mentoring @Mailman
By Andrew Davidson, executive vice dean, and Sarah Jubinski, project manager
Last fall the School introduced its first school-wide junior faculty mentoring program. Formal mentoring brings a number of benefits. These include: guidance in career goals and sustained coaching in achieving them, access to honest criticism and feedback, expanded networks and opportunities for collaboration, advice on responsibilities and priorities, insight into the formal and informal "rules of the road" of academia, and help in developing skills needed to succeed. Formal mentoring programs have been shown to be especially valuable for increasing the career success of faculty members from traditionally underrepresented groups.
At the conclusion of our first year, we are excited to reflect on our progress. Read more >>
Display Your Research in Academic Commons
By Nicole Bufanio, communications coordinator, Center for Digital Research and Scholarship
This summer we invited everyone at the Mailman School to deposit their scholarly work in Columbia's online repository – and several of you did! Epidemiology faculty member Charles DiMaggio deposited articles and book chapters. The National Center for Disaster Preparedness and the National Center for Children in Poverty provided a comprehensive list of articles and reports.
Join your colleagues and take advantage of this service, provided for free by the Columbia University Libraries, to make your work readily available. Unlike Mailman's faculty directory, which supports only a partial listing of publications, Academic Commons allows an unlimited number of deposits, provides a permanent URL for every item, and is crawled by Google Scholar. Read more >>>
Select Upcoming Events
Thurs., Sept. 24 – The Dirty Rotten Secrets of Health Reform: History Politics, and the Obama Legacy
12:30 – 2:00 PM Todd Amphitheatre (P&S 16‐405)
Tues., Sept. 28 – School Assembly
12:00-1:30 PM Rosenfield Building 8th Floor Auditorium
Wed., Sept. 29 – Remembering Robert N. Butler, MD
4:00 PM All Souls Unitarian Church, 1157 Lexington
Mon., Oct. 4 – How the HIV Epidemic (almost) Stopped Teen Pregnancy and How "Abstinence Only" Stopped That
12:30-1:45 PM B-2 Conference Room
Tues., Oct. 5 – Alumni Reception. Discussion on History and Ethics of Public Health
6:00 PM Cocktails , 7:00 PM Program Columbia University Club of New York (15 West 43rd Street)
Open to students, faculty, alumni and friends. RSVP online
Wed., Oct. 6 – FELA! on Broadway
6:30-10:00 PM West 49th Street
Pre-theater reception for students, faculty, alumnis
Fri., Oct. 15 – Exec. MPH Commencement
5:30 PM Low Library
HHS Secretary Kathleen Sibelius will keynote. (Event open to grads and their guests)
Sun., Oct. 25-26 – Conference on the Changing Landscape of Global Health
Lerner Hall
Video of highlights will be streamed online. Details to come.
For more events and to notify the community about an upcoming event that you are organizing, visit the events calendar online.
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