July 21, 2025
From the Dean Space, for faculty and staff We are well underway with the plans to move our faculty and staff to our temporary spaces, as previously communicated. To summarize, our faculty and staff will be, for the time being, in between 4300 Duncan in the Cortex Innovation District, and in Hillman Hall. About three-quarters of our community will be in the former, the rest in the latter. The general division that has sorted who is where is that the primarily research-focused faculty and staff are at Duncan, primarily education-focused faculty and staff are in Hillman. We are indeed fortunate that in a truly difficult time for the university we have excellent space for our community. Both Duncan and Hillman offer our faculty and staff terrific physical space where we can do our work. So, at the outset, a note of gratitude to the university for its continued support for the project of building an outstanding School of Public Health at WashU, including making sure we have space to do our work in the short term. In the long term, as previously discussed at several school assemblies, the plan is to move to other space that can unify the school; those plans will evolve slowly and will engage and involve the community as they start to come into focus. Moving into our space is exciting. It represents an opportunity for us to start forming a community identity, and to “settle down” for a bit, start forming roots, even as we look ahead to other, more unifying space in the future. At the same time, I am well aware that space moves occasion anxieties, and sometimes information flows get crossed. I have heard some of these, even as I am sure there are others, so I thought I would address them here, as I have tried to address concerns that have emerged as we build the school. First is the concern that our community will be in two different places. That is indeed a concern and is, of course, less than ideal, even as it is the reality of many schools that they are across buildings, often miles apart. We shall work hard to overcome this through programming in both locations, ensuring that we engage staff and faculty across both sites, and, of course, students when they come on board. In the long term, this will be overcome by the school’s more permanent home, but in the interim years, we will work to bridge these gaps, and my hope is that “we” here is all of us, with gratitude in advance for all the staff and faculty who will help us bridge our two homes. Second, the Duncan space involves new arrangements than what many have been used to. There is a general universitywide (and indeed sectorwide, at all universities around the country) move to ensure space efficiency, creating more shared workstations to reflect more current ways of working. Does this pose potential challenges to how we have been used to working? I suspect so. Can it be overcome? Definitely. It is our collective task to make sure we build community even as some are working in different ways, to respect and create space for that, but to continue, as we have been doing, to build an identity for a school that finds synergies in its collective. Third, perhaps more prosaically, there has been some confusion around the availability of free parking at 4300 Duncan. All parking in all university space is governed by central parking systems, and we have no control over that. Individuals who would like to purchase a parking permit for 4300 Duncan will be able to do so via WashU Parking and Transportation. The garage at the Neuroscience Research Building is one block away from 4300 Duncan, and there will be an opportunity to purchase a parking pass there. We will send specific information on how to do this next week. In addition, as a reminder, all faculty, staff and students have the opportunity to get a free WashU Metro U-Pass that allows for unlimited use of Metro buses and MetroLink. 4300 Duncan is a short walk from the Cortex MetroLink stop. Fourth, will this be a good thing for us? The answer here is straightforward: absolutely. Sure, this is complicated, and sure, it is imperfect. But for a new school (six months in) to have the space we have available to us at Duncan and Hillman is simply extraordinary and hard to see happening at any other university but WashU at this moment in time. We have beautiful space in which to build community. And that we shall do. Through Associate Dean Sunghei Han, we shall create opportunities for faculty and staff to be involved in opportunities to improve the spaces as we figure out how best to use the space, starting with an open house that is scheduled, as previously noted, from 10 a.m. to noon Thursday, July 31. I will end on two notes. In the swirl of any moment of change, I think it is hard to forget the good. And, well, this is good, and represents the hard work of many over the past year. In particular, I want to acknowledge the work of Provost Beverly Wendland and Executive Vice Provost Mary McKay, who made all this possible; the collaboration of Dean Traube and our colleagues at the Brown School to make our being in part in Hillman possible; the leadership of Associate Dean Sunghei Han and her team, which has been navigating the many complexities of a move, keeping about 181 of us (the total number of our faculty and staff at the moment) aligned. And, a note of thanks to everyone for your patience and grace during space moves. As always, please let me know if any questions. I am truly looking forward to our space moves, our settling, our building community in places, across Duncan and Hillman, and moving forward with the work of building an outstanding School of Public Health. Public Health News New to the school We welcome a new faculty member and a new staff member this week. Anusha Vable, ScD, MPH, joins the School of Public Health as an associate professor. She comes from the University of California, San Francisco, where she led a research team focused on structural solutions to health disparities. A social epidemiologist, Vable studies how education, income and occupation shape aging-related health outcomes, and how policies can reduce or widen health inequalities across populations. Haileigh Guenther joins the school’s Office of Faculty Affairs as the faculty affairs coordinator for faculty development. In this role, she will provide coordination and support for interim and long-range strategic faculty development initiatives and planning for faculty development activities. Public Health Ideas As part of Public Health Ideas, Dean Sandro Galea, talked with Dan Giammar, PhD, the Walter E. Browne Professor of Environmental Engineering, director of the Center for the Environment, and a secondary faculty member and co-director of the Planetary Health Innovation Research Network at the School of Public Health. They discussed climate change and the impact of environmental regulations on the health of populations. See the video here. Research news ICTS membership School of Public Health faculty are invited to become members of the WashU Institute of Clinical and Translational Sciences via this link. Among the services and benefits offered by the ICTS are access to internal grant funding, training opportunities, and resources that help with grant development and execution. SPH’s Office of Research Affairs, led by Associate Dean of Research Lisa Klesges, will liaise carefully with ICTS to elevate opportunities for SPH faculty to develop their research programs. If you have questions about ICTS, please feel free to reach out to Christina Buckel, ICTS associate director. FARM grant applications due Applications are due Friday, August 1, for Track 2 of the FARM Cultivate Grants Fund. The Food and Agriculture Research Mission (FARM) at WashU School of Public Health established the grants fund to support research into practical, scalable innovations that contribute to sustainable transformation of agricultural and food systems and improved public health. Track 2 is designed for interdisciplinary teams conducting rigorous preliminary investigations into novel concepts, approaches and methodologies.These awards provide up to $250,000 of support over two to three years to propel promising research forward. See here for guidelines and instructions. The application deadline for Track 1 was July 1. NIH changes policy regarding use of AI Last week, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) posted new guidance for researchers on the usage of artificial intelligence (AI). The new guidance is intended to help maintain the fairness and originality of the NIH’s research application process. The NIH also is instituting a new policy limiting the number of applications the institutes will consider per principal investigator (PI) per calendar year. The changes are due to what the NIH said is a growing trend of PIs submitting large numbers of applications, some of which may be generated with AI tools. To prevent excessive submissions and remain consistent with NIH grants policy, the NIH will no longer consider applications that are substantially shaped by AI, or that contain sections substantially developed by AI, to be applicants’ original ideas. If the NIH detects AI within an application, the NIH may contact the Office of Research Integrity to investigate potential research misconduct. Consequences may include, but are not limited to: disallowing costs; withholding future awards; wholly or partially suspending the grant; or possible termination. Starting with applications submitted for the Sept. 25 receipt date, the NIH will only accept six new, renewal, resubmission, or revision applications from an individual PI/program director or multiple PI in a calendar year. Looking ahead RSVP for orientation and All-School Retreat If you have not had a chance to RSVP for the School of Public Health’s upcoming All-School Retreat, and the faculty and staff orientations, please RSVP here for both the retreat and orientation. There is one link to register for both events. Orientation for staff will be held over breakfast, from 9 to 11 a.m. Wednesday, August 13. Orientation for faculty will be held over lunch, from 1 to 3 p.m. Wednesday, August 13. Our inaugural, in-person All-School Retreat will be held from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Thursday, August 14. Pre-reads and an agenda for the ASR are here. A note on holidays With supervisor approval, all SPH faculty and staff may end the workday at noon the day before major holidays. For planning purposes, here is a list of such holidays this fall semester. Thanksgiving, Thursday, Nov. 27 Christmas Eve, Wednesday, Dec. 24 New Year’s Eve, Wednesday, Dec. 31 Let us know If you have SPH news, events or research to share, please send details to Elizabethe Holland Durando, SPH director of communications and change management. |