Michael A. Joseph Appointed as Next Vice Dean for Education

Michael A. Joseph, PhD, MPH, has been appointed the Columbia Mailman School of Public Health’s next Vice Dean for Education. Joseph will also be an associate professor of epidemiology and will begin his new role on March 1. Julie Kornfeld served as Vice Dean for Education between 2016 and 2020 and is now Columbia University Vice Provost for Academic Programs. Linda Cushman and Claire Norton currently serve in an interim capacity.

Joseph will join Columbia Mailman from SUNY Downstate School of Public Health, where he has served for 16 years in key leadership roles, including as Vice Chair of the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics and interim chair of the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences. He is currently Vice Dean for Academic and Student Affairs and a tenured associate professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics.

During his two-year tenure as vice dean, Joseph helped drive a substantial increase in the school's enrollment. He also built partnerships between SUNY Downstate and New York colleges with sizeable populations of Black, Latinx, and first-generation college students that created a strong pipeline of qualified graduates to Downstate’s MPH program.

A highly regarded teacher and curricular innovator, Joseph was recognized with the prestigious SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2013. For the past nine years, he has taught the American Public Health Association Learning Institute Course, “Biostatistics for Non-Statisticians,” which he created to fill a gap in public health proficiency to benefit students with varying levels of knowledge, skills, and expertise. He then adapted this course to design “Statistical Computer Applications in Epidemiology,” now an integral component of Downstate's MPH in biostatistics program. Internationally, he has extensive experience in building biostatistics and epidemiology capacity and has conducted training sessions in Zimbabwe, South Africa, Estonia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan.

Joseph is involved in several pipeline programs designed to steer students from disadvantaged backgrounds into health professions schools: the Summer Enrichment Program in Health Policy and the Future Public Health Leaders Program (University of Michigan), Project IMHOTEP and Public Health Leader Fellowship Program (Morehouse College), and the Health Science Academy at the Arthur Ashe Institute for Urban Health (SUNY Downstate). He is known for being intensely committed to students at all educational levels and has received numerous awards for his outstanding mentorship.

Joseph received his BS in Health Science from Brooklyn College, his MPH in Chronic Disease Epidemiology from Yale University, and his PhD in Epidemiologic Science from the University of Michigan. He completed postdoctoral training in the Division of Cancer Prevention and Control at Mount Sinai School of Medicine.

“Dr. Joseph will bring strong, innovative leadership as we navigate a complex environment. He joins Columbia Mailman at a particularly exciting moment for the School as we approach next year’s Centennial. He also joins at a time when the pandemic has brought both new challenges and new opportunities for recruiting, educating, and supporting students,” said Dean Linda P. Fried.