State of the School Address Provides Overview of Strong HSPH in Challenging Times

Julio Frenk and David Hunter delivered the 8th Annual State of the School Address, their first as deans of the

School, to a capacity crowd in the Kresge cafeteria on October 5, 2009, providing an overview of HSPH's financial status, research priorities, reorganizational efforts and milestones.

A PIN-enabled webcast of this year's State of the School Address is available.

To provide a context for the address, Dean Frenk reminded HSPH members about a set of internal and external priorities for himself and for his team that he defined when he first became dean of the School in January:

• Improve academic governance
• Restructure administration and re-engineer work processes
• Review criteria for faculty recruitment, development, and promotion
• Enhance educational experience
• Establish a long-term, sustainable solution for space challenges
• Practice good stewardship to deal with economic crisis
• Build stronger collaborative bridges with the rest of the University, starting with global health
• Structure opportunities for knowledge translation
• Get ready for endowment recovery ("Invest in the Best")

Said Dean Frenk: "We have a new academic team as of July 1st. We've finished the first round of restructuring. There are new governance bodies that are now meeting regularly, particularly the Academic Council now has monthly meetings to review some really strategic issues, starting with the promotion criteria. We've launched the research transformation project to better help our faculty and research scientists continue to be the most competitive school of public health when it comes to external funding for research. I'm committed to continue to engage with the staff members and the entire community in reporting to you progress along the priorities."

Looking ahead, Dean Frenk hopes to use the 2013 centennials of the founding of the Harvard-MIT School for Health Officers -- the precursor to HSPH -- and the Welch-Rose Report, which established the model for schools of public health, as an occasion to rethink what it means to be a school of public health in the 21st century. A key aspect of this is knowledge translation.

"We have a single product: knowledge. We are engaged in the production of knowledge through research, the reproduction of knowledge through higher education, and we need also to create mechanisms for translating knowledge into evidence for the benefit of the public, policymakers, and practitioners, in order to make the world a better place."

School Community
Hunter, who became Dean for Academic Affairs on August 1, 2009, updated the School on additions and changes to leadership positions, including the appointments of Michael Grusby and Karen Emmons to the new positions of Senior Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Associate Dean for Research, respectively. 

The School needs to do better in terms of helping faculty with grant applications and obtaining the highest possible success rates, said Dean Hunter. We are subject to an increasing set of regulations, and so Emmons has taken on the task of helping faculty understand and be in compliance with different regulations.

Several new faculty appointments were made in the last year. In addition, Dean Hunter noted that HSPH's staff grew by nearly eight percent during a year in which many institutions and organizations laid off employees. This growth reflected HSPH's relatively low dependence on the Harvard endowment, which has declined this past year.

The School is in strong financial shape due to prudent fiscal management during previous administrations, Dean Frenk said. However, HSPH remains vulnerable due to its reliance on federally sponsored research dollars. The School must plan for the future, which requires creative thinking. He shared that he is looking at new ways of increasing revenue, including expanding continuing education programs, in addition to looking to efficiency gains to help the bottom line.

Dean Frenk also reviewed the steps that the School is taking to find solutions for space challenges in the wake of the University's decision to slow development in Allston. In response, space in buildings on nearby Smith Street is being prepared for HSPH and space at Simmons College is already in use.

Educational Programs and Student Life
Chief among the priorities aimed at improving students' experience at HSPH is increasing financial aid. Said Dean Frenk: "My predecessor, Barry Bloom ... emphasized student aid, so that we could continue to attract the best and brightest minds in the world to come to study here in the Harvard School of Public Health. That's exactly the area where we're hurting, because it's the endowment that's gone down. So I have made this my number one fundraising priority -- to expand financial aid for students."

A second part of enriching the educational experience at the School is engaging in ongoing educational reform effort, said Dean Frenk.

He said: "This is a long-term initiative. It's a major aspect of thinking what it is to be a school of public health in the 21st century. It's already created innovations like the Foundations course, the adoption of the case method, but we need to think carefully about both curricular content and educational technologies, and diversifying the mix of our educational products. And I think particularly, expanding executive education can be both a way of reaching the larger constituency of persons around the world through our leadership development initiative."

The School successfully concluded a recent site visit as part of a series of accreditation activities. Dean Hunter noted that 115 faculty, administrators, students, alumni, and community members were involved in the visit. Before that, a large team led by Michelle Bell put a lot of work into what the committee described as one of the best sets of materials they had seen to describe the full length and breadth of HSPH's educational research and service offerings, said Dean Hunter.

The School has increased the number of programs for students, their families and spouses -- with an emphasis on easing the transition from different cultures and environments.

A student lounge in Kresge 206 has added to the casual space for informal meetings, while sections of the School, such as Kresge 110, display photographs taken by HSPH students around the world. "This gives you an instant visual perspective of not only what we do as public health workers internationally, but what our students are actively engaged in," observed Dean Hunter.

Staff Engagement and Resources
Surveys have indicated that HSPH staff members are more engaged in their work now than in the past; the staff engagement score is up to 77 percent from 61 percent. The School's Human Resources office also has focused efforts on performance review and management, achieving a 94 percent participation rate in performance management this year. A new exit review process to understand why employees leave HSPH has led to a decline in voluntary departures from 17 to 11 percent.

HSPH employees participated in more than 477 educational courses using tuition assistance program funds, noted Dean Hunter, and 780 employees took advantage of the fitness benefit reimbursement program. Many HSPH members have attended seminars about personal financial learning and management and have taken advantage of the School's work/life balance efforts and programs.

Going Greener
Over the past year, efficiency gains have helped the School save money as well as reduce its carbon footprint, Dean Hunter said. Last year, HSPH saved approximately $17,000 by diverting waste from the trash to recycling and composting. And the School leads the way across Harvard in reducing greenhouse gas emissions over the last three years.

Since February, the Dean's Office has received more than 100 suggestions from community members focusing on ways in which the School can be more efficient. Among those that have been implemented include the Ken's List office supply swap website, and the increased use of energy-efficient lighting. Dean Hunter encouraged the ongoing submission of suggestions through the website.

Q&A
The State of the School Address ended with questions from the audience that touched on trends in public health research, new funding opportunities available at the School for junior faculty and other researchers with new ideas, and the ways in which the success of translational research can be measured.

Dean Frenk observed that even in these times of enormous complexity, "universities have a critical role to play in understanding this complexity and facing it." And Harvard School of Public Health is uniquely positioned for success. "We have a comprehensive research capability that really is unmatched," he said.

In closing he noted, "We're a great school of public health within a great university. That unique combination is what we need to build on."

-- Amy Roeder. Photos by Suzanne Camarata.