Greetings from Dean Bloom, August 31, 2007, Harvard Public Health NOW

Dear HSPH Community:

Barry R. Bloom

It is always with a sense of anticipation and possibility that I welcome students, staff, and faculty to a new academic year. We start this year under the leadership of a new president of Harvard University. Drew Faust, Lincoln Professor of History, began her official duties this July and will be formally inaugurated in October. We all look forward to working with her to advance the mission of HSPH and the many important agendas of public health. I would also like to take this opportunity to express my deep appreciation of Derek Bok for his wise and steadfast leadership of the University as interim president this past year. And please join me in congratulating our neighbor, Harvard Medical School, on its choice of new dean Jeffrey Flier, a superlative biomedical scientist and longtime colleague.

Office for Educational Programs

I would like to update everyone on a few significant undertakings at the School. We established this year the Office for Educational Programs to develop a forward-looking and coherent curriculum for each HSPH program to prepare students for leadership positions in public health practice and research. The office is headed by Associate Deans for Educational Programs Nancy Kane and Nancy Turnbull, who have unveiled an 18-month strategic plan. The effort includes consultations with faculty, alumni, students, employers, and an Education Steering Committee.

HSPH Reaccreditation

One of the responsibilities of the Office for Educational Programs is to prepare HSPH for reaccreditation through the Council on Education for Public Health. We were fortunate to receive the maximum-length accreditation in the last review, and the site visit for our renewal is expected to take place in 2009. Many across the School community will be involved this year in aspects of the self-study to be submitted in March or April 2009, a critical step in the accreditation process.

Allston Campus

The University is proceeding with its plan for a science-based campus in Allston and submitted its draft plan to the Boston Redevelopment Authority in June, and HSPH has a provisional location on the map of that plan. The University maintains a web site about Allston planning, and I encourage everyone to take a look. At HSPH, we will continue to work with the Allston Development Group to determine the optimal space requirements should the School move to Allston. The opportunity to envision how we would enhance the experience of faculty, staff, and, I would say, especially students on a new campus and how we could use this opportunity for greater engagement across the University has the potential to be truly transformative. The challenge is how to maintain and strengthen our ties to our collaborators in the hospitals and medical school.

Incoming Class

This year, the HSPH incoming class has 423 students who are pursuing their degrees. Sixty percent are women, and 35 percent are international students. I wholeheartedly wish all of our students a productive and rewarding year of study and progress.

New and Familiar Faces

In addition, the School welcomes this year Katherine Baicker, who joins our faculty as a professor of health economics in the Department of Health Policy and Management. Professor Baicker comes to us from the Council of Economic Advisers, which advises the White House on domestic and international economic policy issues. Her expertise is in health economics, social insurance and welfare programs, and health insurance financing, and we are delighted that she has come to our School.

Shiriki Kumanyika will be at our School this year as a Yerby Visiting Professor in the Department of Nutrition. Professor Kumanyika is a professor of epidemiology at the Center for Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and associate dean for health promotion and disease prevention at Penn's School of Medicine. Her research is on the control of chronic diseases through studying dietary change and weight management, and she is particularly focused on interventions to prevent these diseases among the African-American population.

Julio Frenk, former Minister of Health of Mexico, will be with us this year as visiting professor of international health in the Department of Population and International Health, as will Dean Jamison, who will be Angelopoulos Visiting Professor of Global Health and Development at HSPH and the Kennedy School. You may remember Dr. Frenk's address at HSPH Commencement just this June. He is a tireless advocate for providing quality health care to all those in need.

Christine Ciotti joined our School in May as associate dean for human resources. An attorney, Ms. Ciotti had been vice president of human resources at the biotechnology company Cubist Pharmaceuticals.

And so to both long-time colleagues and those newly joining our community, I hope that the year both fulfills your expectations and leads you to some unexpected and exciting paths.

Please accept my wishes for a tremendous school year.

Sincerely,

Barry R. Bloom
Dean, Harvard School of Public Health