Public Health Collaborates on a New Model

The Mailman School of Public Health is once again embracing change. With an awareness that resources to support research fluctuate with the economy, the School is collaborating to create a sustainable new model, measuring its aspirations against its resources, and pioneering a path for all schools of public health.

During the Spring 2014 semester, Dean Linda Fried asked the School’s Faculty Steering Committee to lead a series of public sessions to address different ideas for research, teaching, and service to help the School prosper in a new funding climate. More than 100 members of the Mailman faculty participated in discussion groups throughout March and April, as did a group of students from the School’s Master’s and doctoral programs. Addressing both short-term and systemic challenges, members of the Mailman community spoke candidly about their expectations for the institution’s future, how the School’s six departments and three School-wide centers interact, and what structures could increase faculty effectiveness and the School’s overall capacity to attract external funding through interdisciplinary science, new philanthropic relationships, and pioneering relationships with partnerships with global centers, corporations, and governments.

With the dissemination of the Committee’s report, “The Way Forward: Speaking, Listening, and Acting,” Dean Fried and Steering Committee Co-Chairs Ron Bayer and Sally Findley, Professors of Sociomedical Sciences and Population and Family Health, respectively, will hold a special faculty meeting this week to build on the report's recommendations as a basis for setting the path to preserve and enhance the quality of education and research the Mailman School provides.

For Dean Fried, this collaboration is key to thriving in an unfamiliar landscape. “Our field is changing; our resources, our needs, and our future all look quite different today than they did 20, ten, or even five years ago,” she said. “It is gratifying to be a part of an institution that understands the need to find the opportunities in a more than challenging environment, and to have the shared leadership to carve out a solution not only for the Mailman School, but one which our peers in public health can follow.”