New directions for public health
A framework to guide our work towards an exceptional School of Public Health
Dear colleagues:
I hope everyone has been having a very good fall. For this November note I wanted both to share an update on our unfolding plans towards building a School of Public Health and discuss new directions in the field that I see guiding us going forward.
First, thank you to all who have responded to our recently launched search for inaugural faculty for the School. It has been exciting to see the range of talented scientists and scholars, from all over the world, who have reached out, interested in being part of public health at WashU. Applications remain open and we encourage all who are interested in joining our faculty at all levels to apply. More information regarding the application process for faculty interested in joint appointments across schools will be shared shortly.
Second, I would like to thank the many members of the WashU community I have spoken with in recent weeks. I had the privilege of spending several days in St. Louis in October during the Public Health at WashU Annual Conference. During that time, I spoke with many about our shared hopes and ideas for the new School of Public Health. I enjoyed, and was motivated by, our conversations.
As I get closer to moving to St. Louis, I have been enjoying reading up on and learning some history of the city and the region. In 1904, St. Louis hosted the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, an event which has become informally known as the St. Louis World’s Fair. While the fair reflected some of what was challenging about the country at that moment in time—notably in its colonialist representation of Filipino culture in a display meant to “showcase” America’s recently-seized colony—it also gave Americans a glimpse of a better future. It showcased a range of technological advances, including the wireless telephone, X-ray machine, infant incubator, personal automobile, and airplane.
Just as St. Louis was front and center in giving America and the world a look into the future at the fair, WashU has played a similar role through its history generating new ideas, new approaches, and historic firsts. WashU has long been a place that has been motivated by what is new, whether it is cutting-edge science, the ideas that shape our politics, or the technologies that change our world. It seems to me then that our project, building an exceptional School of Public Health is “the newest new” at WashU, building on a long tradition of innovation at the university.
This brings me to the subject of this note. In my presentation at the October Conference, I presented a vision for this School, a four-by-four plan, that rests on four core strategies and four new directions in the field. I had summarized the four strategies—building excellence in faculty, distinction in teaching, interdisciplinarity supported by Public Health Plus, and centering the pursuit of local and global impact—in my October note. Today I will talk about the four new directions in the field that will guide us as we continue to advance public health at WashU: new ways of thinking, new ways of working, new pathways to impact, and new partnerships.
New ways of thinking
COVID-19 in many ways reflected public health at its best, but it also exposed limits in our thinking and in how that thinking informs what we do. We struggled to reconcile tensions between liberty and safety, between respecting individual autonomy and engaging with the paternalism that can sometimes, out of necessity, characterize our work. Public health has also faced communication challenges, with the public increasingly tuning out what we have to say. Emerging from the COVID moment, public health now must reckon with declines in the public’s willingness to trust us, and to trust science generally. These challenges suggest that current frameworks in public health thought need updating if they are to effectively support our efforts in the coming years. This means asking hard questions about how we can better foster the trust that is central to our efforts, about how we should think about paternalism in our work, about how we can more effectively weigh tradeoffs in our decision-making, and about how we can make sure that our actions are aligned with supporting the autonomy and dignity of all. A new philosophy for a new School of Public Health should be able to engage with such questions, face uncomfortable truths, and shape a new intellectual grounding in a world of complexity and change.
New ways of working
We are living through a dynamic historical moment. New technologies and approaches are changing much about what we do and how we do it. A great School of Public Health is one which engages with change. This means applying the latest approaches in data science to understanding the health of populations and informing the policies that support health in a complex, dynamic world. It means using new technologies like AI and remote sensing to analyze and improve health. It means making sure we stay on the cutting edge of public health pedagogy, using technology and novel approaches to support the quality of our educational offerings and to broaden access to them. As the world better awakens to the deep and persistent health gaps that characterize our world, we also need to anchor our work in a concern for health equity. Public health is committed to the proposition that we are not healthy until we are all healthy. The goal of eliminating health inequities can often seem out of reach, but so did many other such goals throughout history until new technologies and approaches brought them to hand. By applying such approaches to the historical goals of public health, we can help usher in a radically healthier world by working innovatively and pragmatically in the moment.
New pathways to impact
A great School of Public Health is a School that is committed to making a real-world difference, every day. We should be thinking always about how we can maximize our impact, in pursuit of our vision of a healthier world at the local, global, and national level. A central avenue for such impact is through our science. Science is most consequential when it is part of a pipeline that starts with high-quality research, invests in translating and communicating that research, and engages with those who make decisions that influence the health of populations. This pipeline is particularly important in times of crisis or uncertainty like COVID, when science must be nimble enough to generate data in contexts of shifting complexity. A great School of Public Health should be able to navigate such contexts, producing science that sheds light on fundamental issues to support practical actions that improve health. Towards this goal, we will conduct science that is rigorous, able to generate evidence and insights quickly, with an eye always toward practical applications, to shape a body of expertise that brings people and organizations together in pursuit of health.
New partnerships
While public health has long been comfortable partnering with government and communities, the field’s scope of partnership has been limited. We have at WashU an opportunity to re-invent partnerships in public health. WashU has always been a place of synergies, of people coming together guided by an ideal of excellence. The new School of Public Health will draw on this tradition to forge relationships, both internal and external to the University, that advance the mission of public health and contribute to excellence at WashU and beyond. This means building partnerships in sectors—private and public—where the field has historically had less engagement. In particular, there are many areas where public health can work with the private sector to advance a vision of health. Public health can offer data and analytic capacity, and the private sector can provide the means to scale up our ability to use these tools to make positive change. We will also continue to pursue partnerships with government, to ensure our work informs policies which support better health for all. Such partnerships will help us advance a vision of health that draws from the best of many fields and disciplines, strengthening our efforts while delivering value to our partners to make their enterprises stronger and more health-focused, to our mutual benefit.
These new directions emerge from observations of a field in evolution. As we go about building a new School of Public Health, we have an opportunity to look ahead to where the field is headed, and to make sure that we lean into directions that shall characterize the future. Public health’s ongoing evolution reflects a world that is trending towards greater complexity every day. Engaging with this world, making it healthier, means building a School like no other, a place where the future of public health informs what we do, and how we do it. Thank you to everyone who has contributed to this process. I look forward to continuing the conversation in the coming months.
Until then.
Warmly,
Sandro
