Faculty & Staff

Welcome to the first issue of Momentum! This monthly 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.

A little over a year ago, we worked together to set some remarkably ambitious goals in our overall strategic plan. One aspect of our strategic plan was to reframe our approaches to communications.  I am pleased to welcome former TIME magazine science editor Claudia Wallis as our Associate Dean for Strategic Communications. She is the editor of this newsletter (though this sentence was my idea!) and, is already leading us into new visions and capabilities for internal and external communications.  

As a new academic year begins, I am pleased to report on our steady progress in reaching our strategic goals.   Let’s look how far we’ve come in three key areas:

1. Investing in our faculty.  As you know, we’ve been building a robust infrastructure to support the professional success of our faculty. Through our "R-squared" (Research Resources) effort, ably directed by Robyn Gershon, and in collaboration with Rosa Rivera, we’ve enhanced our research infrastructure and made it more tailored to your needs, provided training in how to use a new set of tools for grant applications, and engaged in building knowledge and skills for scientific writing.  Thanks to the efforts of Melissa Begg, we are also strengthening support for interdisciplinary work. Other key pieces of this effort are our commitment to building teaching skills and to faculty mentoring, which we began last year and are committed to bring to full fruition this year. You will read more about this in an article by Andy Davidson in this edition.
2. Developing new areas of expertise and scholarship. As public health and health system needs have evolved, so must our scholarship. Last year we launched new initiatives in global health, chronic disease prevention, and climate and health. This year we will build on all of these efforts. Our first Grand Rounds this week was the first to be sponsored by the Global Health Initiative and the focus couldn’t be more relevant to our efforts: defining the role of a university in global health. In October we will host our first major conference on global health. Partnering with the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the Association of Schools of Public Health, we will be bringing together thought leaders from five continents to discuss the future of global health and the leadership role of public health within it. It’s a tremendous opportunity for our school to demonstrate our outstanding work in global public health and amplify our impact. Kaiser Family Foundation has generously agreed to webcast portions of the event. The Global Health Initiative, led by a school-wide steering group under the direction of Drs. Wafaa El-Sadr and Alistair Ager, is shaping a number of interdisciplinary issues and new approaches to meet our school's goals for increased global contributions.  You will hear more about this in upcoming issues of this newsletter.

    

   In the area of chronic disease, Dr. Moise Desvarieux is leading an outstanding group of faculty in considering the school's mandate to lead on prevention for the now number-one killer worldwide: chronic non-communicable diseases, including cardiovascular and pulmonary diseases, diabetes, hypertension, and cancers.  With the exportation of the western lifestyle globally, the rise in obesity and these diseases has been tremendous, often superimposed on preexisting health needs.  More effective approaches to prevention and the design of health systems is therefore essential.  Our chronic disease working group is currently crafting such innovative solutions. Again, stay tuned for more about this.

   And in climate and health, I am delighted to report that we are moving forward, under the leadership of Dr. Patrick Kinney and the Department of Environmental Health Sciences, to create a strong program of science, education and impact in this area.    Faculty recruitments are underway as a basis for increased leadership on the critically important topic of how climate change is affecting health, and how we can prevent and mitigate its impact.

3. Renewing our Curriculum. At a meeting in July, our department heads voted to go forward with a bold effort to reshape our MPH curriculum for the 21st century—with a roll-out date of September 2012. I am proud of the effort and initiative that has already been devoted to this crucial endeavor and grateful to all of you for your work you’ve begun.   I am particularly excited by the deep dedication of 100 of our faculty in designing a visionary curriculum that will educate students in the knowledge and skills they will need to lead in 2020, 2030, and beyond. I hope you will take the time to read Sandro Galea’s report on curriculum renewal in this newsletter.

I see the year ahead as a tipping point on all of these fronts. It is indeed a time of tremendous momentum for the Mailman School. As we work together we are building the future of our school, which stands on the foundation of your excellence and is so much greater than the sum of its parts! Let me just add that Momentum was designed to be a two-way street—we look forward to your feedback and ideas.

With gratitude and all good wishes for the year ahead,

Linda P. Fried, Dean