Harvard School of Public Health Annual Report 2002

Top: Faculty in the Department of Environmental Health briefed staff at the US Department of Transportation's Volpe Center on how to think strategically about bioterrorism and the transit system.

Middle: Professor Jennifer Leaning went to Afghanistan on a humanitarian mission for Physicians for Human Rights.

Bottom: Faculty members voted in January 2002 not to accept research funding from tobacco manufacturers and their subsidiaries.

Photos: Center, Courtesy of Physicians for Human Rights; Top and Bottom, Kent Dayton

IN FISCAL YEAR 2002, our faculty rallied to address head-on new threats posed by bioterrorism and human rights violations and at the same time stayed the course in their fight against infectious and chronic disease--efforts that often overlap and are mutually reinforcing. Nearly 300 people packed three auditoriums at the School for a symposium I hosted on bioterrorism. Professor Jennifer Leaning went to Afghanistan on a humanitarian mission for Physicians for Human Rights, and Professor Robert Blendon embarked on several polling projects to assess how terrorism had impacted Americans' attitudes and behaviors. Faculty in the Department of Environmental Health briefed staff at the US Department of Transportation's Volpe Center on how to think strategically about bioterrorism and the transit system, while researchers at the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis spoke with senior communications officials from a wide range of federal agencies about the role of risk perception and communication in the fight against terrorism. It was remarkable in a School of many individualized departments and centers how readily people came together to collaborate and contribute to an urgent national need.

Recognizing that smoking is the largest preventable cause of disease and death in the US, faculty members, after full discussion of the centrality of academic freedom in a university, voted in January 2002 not to accept research funding from tobacco manufacturers and their subsidiaries. Their action formally raised what had been a general practice at the School for a number of years to the level of institutional policy. They were officially commended for their decision by the American Cancer Society, the American Lung Association, the American Heart Association, and the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids last spring.

Ethical and legal dilemmas such as these are becoming more commonplace in the public health arena so we have also brought on board a number of new faculty members who are experts at exploring these dimensions of our field. Two of this country's outstanding bioethicists, Norman Daniels from Tufts University and Dan Wikler from the University of Wisconsin-Madison Medical School and the WHO were appointed professors of ethics and population health in the Department of Population and International Health. Michelle Mello and David Studdert, both assistant professors of health policy and law in the Department of Health Policy and Management, were recruited to expand the School's offerings of law-related courses--covering such topics as health care law, legal and ethical issues in the AIDS epidemic, malpractice suits, and welfare reauthorization--in the Program in Law and Public Health. With the legal aspects of health being such a major national and international issue, they are now working with colleagues at Harvard Law School to explore the possibility of creating a joint MPH/JD program between our faculties. Ethical Issues in Health Research in Vulnerable Populations was also the subject of a recent Future of Public Health symposium, a conference series created with the support of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, through which we bring the best minds in a range of public health disciplines to the School to share their views on the directions our field should go.

Our numbers continue to grow, due in no small part to the addition of quite a number of junior faculty, particularly in the areas of biostatistics and environmental health. In the 2001-2002 academic year, we had 350 faculty members with 182 primary appointments. But, taking into account the 600 researchers and 800 valued staff members who support our important work here at the School, finding a place to house us all is becoming more and more challenging. Space constraints at the School are nothing new; we have long had the highest density of faculty and federal dollars per square foot at the University. At present a third of our space is, in fact, leased, including about 98,000 square feet at the historic Landmark Center Building, about a 15-minute walk from our main campus on Huntington Avenue. This building now houses more than 300 members of our faculty and staff. Several options are under consideration to alleviate this on-going problem, from sharing a new mixed-use building adjacent to our campus with Harvard Medical School to possibly relocating the entire School to new facilities on land recently acquired by Harvard University in Allston/Brighton a decade from now.

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