WashU has a vision to mobilize research, education, and patient care to establish WashU and St. Louis as a global hub for transformative solutions to the deepest societal challenges.

Through our planned new School of Public Health (our first new school in 100 years), WashU will drive equitable, evidence-based public health initiatives and provide a world-class training ground for future public health leaders.

Our accreditation timeline continues to move successfully toward key 2024 milestones and a dean search is underway and engaging top candidates. In response to strong student interest, WashU has faculty in place for “Foundations in Public Health” and through Arts & Sciences, we are on track to offer a Public Health & Society undergraduate major by Fall of 2025.

Click here for a detailed timeline.

Since joining the Washington University School of Medicine in September 2023, Juliet Iwelunmor, PhD, has been making her mark on population health by working to sustain evidence-based health interventions among young people in resource-limited settings. She is “committed to diversifying research excellence among researchers and community organizations” through her grants as stories program. This approach to grant writing inspires people to create health solutions that address community needs worldwide, while being open to failure as evidenced in what she calls “a failure resume.”

Researchers at the Brown School and the School of Medicine at Washington University in St. Louis have discovered that social determinants of health are contributing to an elevated risk of Alzheimer's disease and related dementia. According to Jean-Francois Trani, PhD, an associate professor and public health faculty scholar, addressing these social determinants through early-life public policies is crucial for the prevention of Alzheimer's and related dementia.

Young people are developing bowel cancer at record rates. Yin Cao, MPH, ScD, associate professor of surgery and medicine in the Public Health Sciences Division at Washington University School of Medicine, and team, have received $25 million in funding from Cancer Grand Challenges, co-founded by Cancer Research UK and the National Cancer Institute, part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). She spoke about the international study on The Guardian podcast. 

Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis is one of seven U.S. institutions joining a new national clinical trials network launched by the National Cancer Institute (NCI) to investigate emerging technologies for cancer screening, with the goal of reducing cancer-related illnesses and deaths. A key priority of the network is to ensure the clinical trials include participants from diverse populations. 

State tobacco control programs that used a new training model were better able to sustain operations, finds a new study from the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis. The study, titled “Action planning for building public health program sustainability: results from a group-randomized trial,” was published this month in the journal 'Implementation Science'.

As the leader of the Centre for Health and Health care and a member of the executive committee at the World Economic Forum, WashU Alumnus Shyam Bishen, PhD, is dedicated to advancing more efficient and equitable health care worldwide. “Levels of respiratory, cardiovascular and infectious diseases are all growing because of climate change and global warming,” Bishen says. How do we come up with new treatments that are suitable for the locations that are going to be most impacted by climate change?”

Community Health Workers (CHWs) are critical members of care delivery teams who facilitate access to consistent quality and culturally sensitive health care to the communities they serve. Last September, the Center for Advancing Health Services at Washington University convened a diverse group of leaders to discuss possibilities for new reimbursement models for Community Health Worker (CHW) services in Missouri.

Gerontologist Jacquelyn Benson, associate professor of medicine at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, spoke at the Issues in Aging webinar series about family dynamics when caring for older adults with serious illnesses like cancer or dementia. Benson develops psychosocial and behavioral interventions for positive family connections and better mental health outcomes for family caregivers of older adults.

The Office of the Provost, Global Health Center, and the Center for Advancing Health Services, Policy & Economics Research, are pleased to welcome special guest, Margaret Kruk, MD, MPH, professor of health systems, Department of Global Health and Population at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, for a discussion on ways to improve health systems through collaborative research. Kruk’s research generates evidence on how health systems can improve health for people living in low-income countries.

The Annual Friedman Lecture & Awards honors those making an outstanding contribution to the field of aging and the 2024 keynote is presented by Karl Pillemer, PhD, of Cornell University. “Climate Change in an Aging World” focuses on the world’s ever-increasing environmental challenges while our aging population continues to rapidly expand; and the larger role older adults play in contributing to climate change solutions. 

In light of Washington University's momentous decision to establish a new School of Public Health, the first new school in 100 years, panelists will discuss the critical role of the arts and humanities in public health, with emphasis on the sexual and reproductive body. The panel will include an array of distinguished speakers providing prospectives across multiple creative and scientific disciplines.