Welcome to the 2015–2016 Academic Year.
Dear Colleagues:
Welcome to the 2015–2016 academic year.
This is always an exciting time of year, as we welcome new students to our School community and welcome back all our students, faculty, and staff, with hopes that all have had an opportunity for a restorative summer.
I look ahead to the coming academic year with excitement. We have a wide range of plans that shall unfurl over coming months, including a full suite of school-wide events including Public Health Fora, Seminars on Contemporary Public Health Issues, and Expert Symposia. We shall be celebrating the School’s 40th anniversary in 2016 that will bring together members of the School community from all over the world, renewing our collective engagement in the School and its future. We shall be announcing these as they unfold, and look to engage as much of the School community as possible in all these events.
Meanwhile, I wanted to share two announcements with the full School community. First, I am delighted to announce a change to our School’s structure that will, going forward, permit us to deepen our commitment to our core areas of scholarship, allowing us to take our work to the next level. Effective September 1, 2015, we have merged two departments, creating the combined Department of Health Law, Policy, and Management (HLPM). This new department, bringing together faculty from our current Departments of Health Law, Bioethics, and Human Rights and Health Policy and Management, will be at the forefront of the global scholarly conversation about the role of laws, policies, and health systems in shaping the health of the public. In bringing together these two departments, we create a stronger faculty community that helps us better reach our aspirations—understanding the conditions that make people healthy so that we may indeed improve these conditions. In parallel to this, we have created a School-wide Center for Health Law, Ethics, and Human Rights (CLER). The center will preserve the visibility of health law as a spike of excellence in the School and, more importantly, create a vehicle through which we can conduct work across all school units, infusing in our thinking the centrality of law, ethics, and human rights to all our work.
Professor David Rosenbloom serves as chair ad interim of the new HLPM department, and Professor George Annas serves as director of the CLER. I would like to thank Professors Annas and Rosenbloom for their partnership in conversations over the past year as we have moved towards this and all the faculty, staff, students, and alumni who we have consulted during these discussions for their enthusiasm for this change. I look forward to the scholarship that we hope these changes will galvanize.
Second, and relatedly, we have started this week a search to find permanent leaders for the Departments of HLPM and of Global Health. Both Professor Rosenbloom and Professor Rich Feeley, respectively, have served with distinction in their ad interim department chair roles, and both will continue to serve until such time as we have a permanent chair in place. We, as a whole community, owe Professors Rosenbloom and Feeley a debt of gratitude for their extraordinary service in these roles, and we shall duly celebrate their terms in due time.
We are fortunate that Professor Mary Jane England will be leading the global health department search and that Professor Rich Saitz will be leading the HLPM department search, working with search advisory committees that include members from the relevant departments and representation of distinguished faculty from around the School and the University. A formal thank you to Professors England and Saitz and to all committee members for taking on this most important role.
I am looking forward to the work of the search advisory groups, as I am about many of the other projects we have launched at the School that will be taking place over the coming months.
As we look ahead, three items to look forward to, particularly for our alumni. First, this fall we are launching our first annual school survey, in which we will survey our student, faculty, staff, and alumni community. We aspire to use these data to help us improve the School and our work, and look forward to alumni participation in the survey. Second, in 2016 we will be launching a Student Alumni Mentoring Program (StAMP). We will be inviting alumni who are interested in participating to volunteer in the survey in the fall, and I would encourage all of our alumni to consider being a part of this—I think it will be a tremendous opportunity to keep alumni engaged with the School and for our students to benefit from links to our alumni. And third, please do mark your calendars for SPH events associated with this fall’s BU Alumni Weekend. We have an alumni breakfast on the morning of Friday, September 25, where I will lead a conversation with Jeannette Clough SON ’75, CEO of Mount Auburn Hospital, on future trends in health care. We are particularly excited that Sarah Degnan Kambou ’84, president of the International Center for Research on Women, will be one of three alumni awarded a University-wide alumni award at the Best of BU reception on September 26. I look forward to meeting many more alumni at this event.
More updates in next month’s SPH This Month. Until then, my very best to all for the coming month.
Warm regards,
Sandro
Sandro Galea, MD, DrPH
Dean, Professor
Twitter: @sandrogalea