Looking Ahead in 2020.

I hope everyone had a restful, restorative holiday break with family and friends. It is a new year, a new decade. With this change comes many challenges for health. On a range of issues, we are doing worse on health than we should be. From health disparities, to gaps in life expectancy driven by economic inequality, to our disinvestment in creating the social, economic, and environmental conditions necessary for health, to ongoing issues like obesity, gun violence, climate change, and opioids, we are still far from a society where all can live healthy. At the same time, core issues like migration, politics, and other structural forces are shaping health, and dominating the public conversation.

How we address these issues will determine how healthy we are able to be, as the 21^st century continues to unfold. This is also a presidential election year in the US, which will have enormous implications for health in this country and globally. I have written about how this administration’s policies are shaping health, how they affect core issues such as climate change, gun violence, migration, and the treatment of the other. While the administration’s approach to these issues has often been to ignore them or take steps that worsen the challenges they pose, we have also seen signs emerge in the political realm that are encouraging for health. These include a growing awareness that issues like guns, climate change, and the conditions of migration are, in fact, public health issues. They also include the rise of social movements to address many of the central challenges we face.

This is the context in which we do our work. As a school, we are well-positioned to engage with these issues of consequence, and emerging social movements, as we work towards a healthier world, guided, as always, by our “Think. Teach. Do.” core purpose. Looking to 2020, we will pursue this purpose through our scholarship, teaching, events, and activism, to continue shaping the health conversation, moving our world towards better health for all.

In the area of “think,” our researchers continue to lead in generating scholarship around core public health issues. Examples include Sarah Lipson and Julia Raifman‘s work on the mental health of gender minority college students, Emily Rothman’s exploration of the intersection of opioids and partner violence, and Jonathan Levy’s work on emissions standards. Our scholarship is also enriched by the work of students like Jackie Ellison, who won a Best Poster award at the annual AcademyHealth Research Meeting for her work on sexual and reproductive health. As we move into 2020, our scholars continue to generate knowledge, to shape public health thought. And we continue thinking about the future of our school. Last year, we began Strategic Thinking, to develop a strategy map to guide our school for the next five to 10 years. We will continue this process in the coming months, as we explore how we can make our school ever better in its next decade.

As we work to generate knowledge, we continue to improve our ability to translate that knowledge to the next generation, in keeping with our “teach” mission. We are making progress on this mission through innovation in our curriculum, pedagogy, and in communicating our classroom approach to the wider world, to lead the way in shaping how public health is taught. The development of our online executive MPH has made our program more accessible to busy, mid-career professionals. Our new hybrid MS, launching in the fall of 2020, draws from this model, by including a combination of online and on-campus coursework. We also continue to develop our teaching though our events, and leading on the scholarship of pedagogy. In June, we will follow up on our 2018 Teaching Public Health symposium with a symposium exploring the role of diversity, inclusion, equity, and justice in public health education.

Finally, we will pursue our commitment to “do” in a number of ways in the coming year, starting in our own backyard. Led by our Activist Lab, we will continue to engage with our local Boston community. Key initiatives include our participation in the city’s annual homelessness census, when, as in years past, SPH students, faculty, staff, and alumni will work with hundreds of volunteers to count the number of people living in the street, in shelters or other nonpermanent housing. The day of this year’s census, we will host a Public Health Forum, “From Theory to Practice: What It Takes to Permanently Exit an Individual from Homelessness,” featuring Anahaita Kotval, CEO of Lifting Up Westchester, a nonprofit which serves homeless and other extremely low-income residents of Westchester County. We will host a number of other speakers throughout the year for discussions of core public health issues that inform our thinking and practice. Guests will include, among others, New York Times investigative reporter Sarah Kliff, physician, epidemiologist, and activist Abdul El-Sayed, and Group Head of Global Health and Corporate Responsibility at Novartis, Patrice Matchaba. In addition to our on-campus events, we will host a series of Think. Teach. Do. receptions around the country, which we will undertake in partnership with other BU schools. At these events, we will be joined by other BU Deans, for conversations about issues that shape our world and our health. For more on our school’s commitment to “do,” please do take a look at the 2019 edition of our annual magazine, SPH This Year, which explores our community’s activism at the local, national, and global level.

At SPH, our mission is “To improve the health of local, national, and international populations, particularly the disadvantaged, underserved, and vulnerable, through excellence and innovation in education, research, and service.” We are working to be ever-better at achieving this mission. In recent years, there have been setbacks in this pursuit. But there have also been leaps forward—in how we talk about health, and in how we leverage public policy into healthier populations. In the year, and decade, to come, we have a chance to drive this change towards a future that is radically healthier than our past, by engaging with the fundamental issues we face. As always, it is a privilege to be able to do so as part of this community. I look forward to all we will achieve, together, in 2020 and beyond.

I hope everyone has a terrific week.

Warm regards,

Sandro

Sandro Galea, MD, DrPH
Dean and Robert A. Knox Professor
Boston University School of Public Health
Twitter: @sandrogalea

Acknowledgment: I am grateful to Eric DelGizzo for his contributions to this Dean’s Note.

Previous Dean’s Notes are archived at: http://www.bu.edu/sph/tag/deans-note/