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From the Dean: Happy New Year!
Last week, many of us bid our family and friends a happy new
year. The hopes we are expressing when we say "happy new year" are that the coming months will bring achievement, fulfillment, and
success to those in our lives. I hope that these will also be the hallmarks
of 1999 for the Harvard School of Public Health.
For me, a happy year seems likely. It has certainly begun well.
Over the past six months, I have been traveling throughout the school, meeting with faculty, staff, and students. It's been enthralling to discover the scope and range of teaching and research endeavors here at the school. It's been gratifying to find old friends and colleagues at HSPH advancing in their work and in their careers. It's been inspirational to make new acquaintances, meet new colleagues, and discover areas of public health with which I am less familiar.
Thanks to all of you for the warmth of your welcome. You've helped make me and my wife, Irene, feel at home already.
I am certain that this year will be an exciting one. It's the final year of the millennium, and as such it presents us with a grand opportunity to look back at the past and forward to the future. It's a time to review our past efforts, accomplishments, and failures, and to consider what we've done that has worked, and what we've done that needs work.
This is also a time for us to look to the future--what roles do we want public health to play in the next century? How do we achieve these goals?
I don't have the answers to these questions, though I do have opinions. I also know that the public health challenges we face are too complex for one person to assess accurately. Good public health requires intelligence. It requires creativity. It requires enthusiasm. And it requires these attributes in a strength and measure that only a community can offer.
We have such a community here. Between the departments, divisions, centers, and institutes that comprise the school, we have a wealth of expertise, imagination, and dynamism that will enable us to battle the biologic, economic, and sociologic threats to the public health.
What it takes to capitalize on our resources is collaboration and communicationboth within and outside of the school. I hope that in the near future we can build bridges across barriers at the school and to other schools and institutions. Only by pooling our knowledge, ideas, and enthusiasm can we fully realize the potential of our institution to make a real difference.
The school has several successful examples of this type of cooperative enterprise. The Harvard Center for Children's Health brings together faculty and researchers from our school, Harvard Medical School, Children's Hospital, and more in a successful mission to advance scholarship and improve health for millions of children.
In a similar collaborative spirit, the Harvard Malaria Initiative brings Harvard researchers together with professionals from private industry to form a team that is one of the world's best hopes for discovering or inventing ways to combat this deadly disease.
It is by working together that we will accomplish the most. And it is by communicating with one another that we can best appreciate all that the school has to offer to us, both professionally and personally.
I challenge each of us to widen our perspective a bit--to think about how the work on the floors above and below us, the work done in the buildings next door or down the street, can be combined with our work in new ways to increase our progress.
I have found HSPH to be a very open and, to an outsider, an amazingly friendly community. Thus far, my time at HSPH has been like a honeymoon, and it is one that I hope lasts forever. I look forward to being challenged by each of you, and to working with all of you as we create and meet the goals of public health this year and in the years to come.
Finally, I will need feedback and ask all of you to continue to communicate with me. I'm still very new here, and I depend upon you all to continue in the work that you've been doing, to help me understand your research, and to help me learn how the administration can serve your professional and personal goals.
Also, because I'm human, it is a certainty that I will make mistakes. I hope that you will help me to avoid making many, and that you will offer honest and constructive criticism when I do err.
It promises to be an exciting year. With your help, it can also
be a year that brings achievement, fulfillment, and success to the
school. The needs in public health are great, the potential is
enormous, and the endeavor, I hope, will be a rewarding adventure for all of us.
Barry Bloom, Dean of the Faculty
of Public Health, describes his experience at HSPH thus
far as being "like a honeymoon, and one that
I hope lasts forever."
