Weekly news from the School of Public Health at Washington University in St. Louis
Dear colleagues,
I hope you had a safe, peaceful weekend.
Building a school, committees
As we now start having critical mass of inaugural faculty and staff, we are ready to start building some of the foundational structures of a school, committees, meeting cadence, processes. I shall discuss some of these more mechanical aspects at our next School Assembly on April 16. But, meanwhile, we are moving to start populating some of our core school committees. The list of our chartered committees can be found in our school bylaws.
As a start, we are looking to populate faculty in the Appointment and Promotions, Faculty Development, and Faculty Recruitment committees as well as in our Master’s and Doctoral committees. We also will start populating faculty on our Faculty Senate and staff on our Staff Senate; the latter shall be temporary appointments for this year until we formally constitute elections for these senates starting next year.
If any of our faculty or staff are interested in engaging with one of these committees specifically, can you please let Amanda Rhodes know? We will not always be able to accommodate direct faculty or staff preferences, as we seek balance on a variety of dimensions on all committees, but knowing who might be interested in what will be a good way to try to align interest with availability. Thank you much.
The past week
We held a Thinking Public Health discussion on “The problem of bad behavior.” As with all of these conversations, this was an interesting and engaged discussion, which I both enjoyed and learned from — thank you to all who were there. I look forward to our next one, April 18 in Weil Hall’s Kuehner Court.
We welcomed Opeyemi Babajide, PhD MSc, to speak as part of our Talking Public Health seminar series. She is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Urban Health Collaborative at Drexel University’s Dornsife School of Public Health. A recording of her talk and others will be available here.
And thank you to those who joined the two-day virtual dialogue that involved our school, the Olin School of Business, the World Health Organization and representatives from more than 60 institutions around the world, “Business for health: Finding business and public health convergence towards reducing and managing noncommunicable diseases (NCDs).” The event’s aim was to identify steps to foster transformative change among academic leaders and their institutions, and equip future business leaders to prioritize health equity, societal impact, sustainability, and ethical decision-making alongside profitability and efficiency. It was an informative, energizing discussion with great potential to spur just that.
The coming week
For our Talking Public Health seminar series, we feature this week Gregory Phillips II, PhD, associate professor in the Departments of Medical Social Sciences and Preventive Medicine at Northwestern. He will speak at noon Wednesday, April 2, on “Engaging, Educating, and Empowering: A New Paradigm for Health Research and Evaluation with and for LGBTQ+ Communities.” The talk will be in 333A Goldfarb Hall on the Danforth Campus. RSVP here to attend in person or over Zoom.
We also welcome Stephen E. Lankenau, PhD, professor and director of the Medical Cannabis Research Center at Drexel University Dornsife School of Public Health. He will speak at noon Thursday, April 3, on “New Directions in Cannabis and Overdose Prevention Research.” His talk also will be in 333A Goldfarb Hall. RSVP here to attend in person or over Zoom.
Also of note, the Business of Health Symposium, 8 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. Thursday, April 3, in Knight Hall’s Emerson Auditorium. This inaugural Olin Business School symposium will explore trends in biotechnology and care-delivery innovation with experts across WashU’s business, medical, and public health schools. It includes a Health Plus Business fireside chat with Olin Dean Mike Mazzeo, myself, and Bart Hamilton, the Robert Brookings Smith Distinguished Professor of Economics, Management & Entrepreneurship. See here for details and to register.
Joining the School of Public Health
We welcome a number of new faculty this week.
Todd Combs, PhD, joins the school as an assistant professor. He comes from the Brown School, where he studies the impact of policy and the built environment on health behaviors.
Lora Iannotti, PhD, joins us as the Lauren and Lee Fixel Distinguished Professor and co-director of the School of Public Health’s Food and Agriculture Research Mission. Lora is the founding director of WashU’s E3 Nutrition Lab, which aims to prevent undernutrition through equitable, sustainable and culturally appropriate solutions. Her research on maternal and young-child nutrition is changing national policies in Ecuador and has the potential to benefit millions globally.
Douglas Luke, PhD, the Distinguished Professor in Public Health Systems Science, is joining us from the Brown School. Douglas is the director of the Center for Public Health Systems Science, which aims to create healthier communities by changing systems through research, evaluation and translation. He is a leading researcher in the areas of health policy, systems science, implementation science and tobacco control.
Massy Mutumba, PhD, MPH, BSN, joins us from the University of Michigan, where she was an assistant professor in the Department of Health Behavior and Biological Sciences at the university’s School of Nursing. She received her doctorate and master’s degrees from Michigan’s School of Public Health, and she earned a bachelor’s degree in nursing from Mbarara University of Science and Technology in Uganda. Her work focuses on adolescents and youth in sub-Saharan Africa, particularly self-management interventions for HIV, mental health, and substance use; and reproductive health including sexual violence and family planning among women.
Stephanie Mazzucca-Ragan, PhD, is joining the school as an assistant professor. She comes to us from the Brown School, where she develops community-based healthy eating and physical activity interventions and translates them into public health practice using implementation science.
Mary Politi, PhD, joins the school as a professor. She comes from the Division of Public Health Sciences in WashU Medicine’s Department of Surgery. She studies health communication with an aim of helping patients and the public understand health information and make informed decisions. She works extensively with stakeholders to ensure her research is relevant to end users in clinical and community settings.
Lindsay Stark, DrPH, joins us from the Brown School as a professor. Lindsay is a social epidemiologist and internationally recognized expert on the protection and well-being of women and children in situations of extreme adversity. She measures sensitive social phenomena and evaluates related interventions to reduce violence, abuse and exploitation in humanitarian emergencies.
To all, thank you for becoming a part of the School of Public Health.
Public Health Ideas
A video of my conversation with Tim McBride, the Bernard Becker Professor at the School of Public Health. We discussed a paper Tim co-authored, “Policy implications of fixed-to-total-cost ratio variation across rural and urban hospitals.” To read the paper, see here.
Items to share
If you have news items or new publications you’d like to alert us to, please share with our director of communications, Elizabethe Holland Durando. Thank you.
Also this week
If interested, in The Healthiest Goldfish, some thoughts on how the past two months have disrupted much that we may have believed was largely stable.
And now, to April.
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
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