Dear colleagues,

Transitioning our weekly communications

Public Health in Progress (PHiP) has now been in circulation for six months, delivered every Monday morning to a list of subscribers who signed up to receive news of our work to build a School of Public Health at WashU. Thank you to all who have joined us on this journey so far. As the school matures, we are now shifting our regular communications, segmenting communication that is more directly relevant to our internal community (faculty, staff and students), and to the external community of friends and colleagues. To that end, a few changes. 

This is the last PHiP; we shall retire the name and the format, consigning it to part of the history of building the School of Public Health.

Starting next Monday, July 7, all members of our internal community will begin receiving a weekly “Inside WashU Public Health” email that captures the parts of what have been internal and operational notes in PHiP. Our internal community does not need to do anything to start receiving this — all of our faculty (primary and secondary), staff, and students will begin receiving this next week. This will be delivered weekly, although we may skip a week or two in summer, and we may over time ramp up delivery more days a week as needed. I note for our internal community that “Inside WashU Public Health” is the one email that is important to be read weekly — the leadership team shall coordinate to make sure that we combine everything that all of our community needs to know in this one place, and all are also welcome, encouraged, to submit anything that should have widespread distribution to this internal mailing. 

Starting Sunday, August 31, we shall start an as-yet-unnamed, weekly School of Public Health email that is intended for our external community. Everyone who already has signed up to PHiP or to receive our community notes will be added to the external newsletter mailing list. This will be delivered weekly, every Sunday. For the time being, this will continue to look like an email, but once our new website is up and running we shall transition the external mailing to a more visually appealing newsletter format. The goal of the newsletter is to make sure that our colleagues and friends, inside WashU and outside, are aware both of what we are doing, and also of the outstanding work of our students, staff and colleagues. The newsletter aims to elevate what we do toward our goal of making our science and work more widely available, realizing the vision at the heart of creating a leading School of Public Health. 

A warm note of gratitude to all who have engaged with our communication since the beginning of the new year, who have been along on our journey as we build the school. A thank you to our communication team, led by Elizabethe Holland Durando, for leading us forward. 

Welcoming students to the School of Public Health

We are delighted that starting in the 2025-2026 academic year, students will officially be part of the School of Public Health, which will lead us to graduating our first class of students at Commencement 2026. This is a terrific and exciting step forward for us as a school. A few notes.

What does this mean for faculty and staff? We are continuing to proceed as we already have been proceeding on the faculty and staff front. Under the leadership of Associate Dean of Education Angela Hobson, we have a developed educational unit, and we shall be presenting this unit to our faculty and staff at our August 13 orientation session.

What does this mean for students? As we have previously communicated, nothing will change for students in terms of requirements toward degrees, courses available, ability to have advisors. In 2026, the school will engage in strategic thinking about the curriculum; there will be abundant opportunity for broad community consultation (including, and centrally, students) about that, and we do not anticipate that any of those changes will come into place until fall 2027. We do have a new set of primary contacts for students. These are listed below. In addition, we are creating, as part of the fall student orientation on August 21 and 22, sessions for recurring master’s and doctoral students. We will communicate more specific details in the coming weeks, and encourage all existing students to register and attend in person or virtually. 

A note of gratitude. As we transition students who are in the public health program currently in the Brown School, we will continue working closely with our colleagues at the Brown School on all student issues, to make sure that we have as seamless a handoff as possible. To all of our colleagues in the Brown School — thank you for your partnership on this, as on all of the aspects that have accompanied the emergence of the School of Public Health in the past year. A thank you to School of Public Health staff and faculty for all you are doing in this transition, and a thank you to our students, new and incoming, who bear with the occasional transitional bump, as we lean into our optimistic and exciting next. 

Education contacts:

Public health news

Implementation science grant terminations, combined with the U.S.’ withdrawal of support for HIV prevention and treatment programs, threaten to derail global progress toward ending the HIV epidemic, according to Elvin Geng, MD, MPH, a professor of medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases at WashU Medicine, a secondary faculty member at the School of Public Health, and a co-director of the School of Public Health’s Dissemination & Implementation Science Innovation Research Network (DISIRN). Read more here

Sara Malone, PhD, an assistant professor at the School of Public Health, has been selected to serve on the Methods and Data Council for AcademyHealth, a national organization for health services researchers, policymakers and health-care practitioners. Read more here

Public Health In the News

Karen Joynt Maddox, MD, MPH, a WashU Medicine associate professor of medicine in cardiology, a secondary faculty member at the School of Public Health and a co-director of the School of Public Health’s Policy and Structural Solutions Innovation Research Network, was quoted in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch about proposed changes to Medicaid. 

Tim McBride, PhD, the Bernard Becker Professor and a co-director of the School of Public Health’s Policy and Structural Solutions Innovation Research Network, was interviewed for a story on KOMU-TV news in Columbia, Mo., on the potential impact of proposed federal legislation regarding Medicaid.

Papers of interest

Ozge Sensoy Bahar, PhD, MSW, a research associate professor at the Brown School and a secondary faculty member at the School of Public Health, co-authored “Cost-Effectiveness of an Economic Empowerment and Family Intervention on Mental Health Among School-Going Adolescent Girls in Uganda, 2017‒2022,” published in the American Journal of Public Health.  

Phillip Marotta, PhD, MPH, an assistant professor at the Brown School and a secondary faculty member at the School of Public Health, co-authored “Insurance-related Risk Factors for Leaving Against Medical Advice after Opioid Overdose: A Cross-sectional Study Using Electronic Health Records,” published in the Journal of Addiction Medicine.

Coming next week

More details about our August 13 orientation session and August 14 all-school retreat for faculty and staff shall be forthcoming next week. 

A peaceful holiday week to all.

Warmly,
Sandro

Margaret C. Ryan Dean of the School of Public Health
Eugene S. and Constance Kahn Distinguished Professor in Public Health
Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Initiatives
Washington University in St. Louis

Past PHiPs, as well as Community notes, are archived here. You are receiving this email if you signed up for it or are a core member of the SPH community. Please feel free to reach out to Elizabethe Holland Durando, our director of communications, if you would like an item added in a future SPH newsletter.