{"id":71473,"date":"2015-08-23T06:00:57","date_gmt":"2015-08-23T10:00:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sph\/?p=71473"},"modified":"2020-09-17T10:28:59","modified_gmt":"2020-09-17T14:28:59","slug":"looking-back-looking-ahead","status":"publish","type":"bu-article","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sph\/news\/articles\/2015\/looking-back-looking-ahead\/","title":{"rendered":"Looking Back, Looking Ahead"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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August 23, 2015<\/div>\n\t\t\n\t\t\t\t
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\"deansnote1\"I hope that everyone has been having a terrific summer and enjoying the splendid weather. My family and I have just returned from some time in Cape Cod, learning the area. Taking the opportunity of a few weeks\u2019 summer break, I wanted to reflect on what we have accomplished since the beginning of January, and to look ahead at what will be coming in the 2015\u20132016 academic year that is about to start. I do this both by way of self-reflection, but also to make sure that we live up to our promise that we always communicate clearly and consistently about directions in which the School is headed.<\/p>\n

I articulated my thoughts about a vision for academic public health in a Dean\u2019s Note in January<\/a>. In that Dean\u2019s Note I offered what I called a few framing thoughts that may be useful as scaffolding upon which to build our aspirations. I further elaborated on these thoughts in our January school assembly. Intending to invest in a collective forward-looking vision, we launched a School-wide strategic thinking exercise, co-chaired by Professors Wendy Mariner and Vicky Parker, that has been engaging faculty, staff, students, and alumni in envisioning how we want to frame our longer-term contributions to the health of populations, as well as how we structure ourselves to help us achieve these goals in the shorter term. The strategic thinking exercise has been an engaging exercise for all us, involving 169 members of the School community in preliminary roundtables, 145 of us in a School-wide discussion on May 19, and now with eight inquiry groups working on various ideas that emerged from the last School-wide discussion. Our next School-wide discussion is on September 18. I would encourage, as I have before, all members of the School community to participate. I am grateful to the co-chairs and all the members of the Strategic Thinking Steering Group for guiding us through this, and to all members of our School community for their participation. I see the ideas that are being generated by the strategic thinking exercise as key to our shared future. The goal remains for a report to emerge from this process by the end of 2016 that will then be the blueprint for action by the Governing Council (GC) and School leadership in 2016 and beyond.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, as discussed at the school assembly, the work of the School proceeds apace, even as strategic thinking is helping us shape our forward-looking thoughts and action agendas. In both my prior Dean\u2019s Notes and in school assembly discussions I suggested that we would aspire to meet our charge by working towards contributing to a healthier world by 2030 and by making sure we have the best possible school to do so by 2018. We would therefore launch efforts that were needed\u2014being responsive to areas where we had clarity of action\u2014even while strategic thinking helped us shape our longer-term aspirations. Below I summarize what we have done, interspersed with what we are planning on doing. I organize my thoughts around our work to shore up our foundations as well as our work in each of our three core areas: research, education, and translation.<\/p>\n

Foundational Work to Strengthen the School<\/h3>\n

In some respects, we started on foundations by looking at the school\u2019s DNA\u2014namely our by-laws, as well as the structures that house our academic lives. Led by the GC, we have been working on streamlining the School\u2019s by-laws to reflect the School\u2019s current reality, and I shall present a revised version of the by-laws at our September school assembly. The revised by-laws clarify the School\u2019s organizing architecture and make it easier for us to make changes in the future as our needs change. We have also, as per my message in this SPH This Week<\/a>, created a new Department of Health Law, Policy & Management (HLPM) and a new School-wide Center for Health Law, Ethics, and Human Rights (CLER). These changes, representing nearly a year of discussion among School leadership, faculty, and staff, position us well for excellence in these areas in coming years. In partnership with Professors Don Thea and Rich Feeley and many of the faculty in our Global Health (GH) group, we have also consolidated the position of the Center for Global Health and Development (CGHD) as a School-wide center. A separate visioning exercise, led by Professor Jacob Bor, has been charting a course for CGHD going forward. Perhaps less visibly, Kara Peterson, director of communications, and Leslie Kolterman, assistant dean of development and alumni relations, have led the strengthening of our communications and development groups, elevating the work of these groups as essential both to our translational missions and to the long-term future of the School as we aim to build a sustainable foundation for the current community and for the students, staff, and faculty who will come after us. We have launched a series of communication efforts<\/a> under the label of SPH Today, SPH This Week, SPH This Month, and SPH This Year, all of which are communicated to both internal and external audiences, aiming to keep our community apprised of our plans in a timely fashion. On the development side, we have been expanding our school\u2019s Dean\u2019s Advisory Board, have launched regional annual alumni events, and have launched plans for a 40th anniversary celebration of the School in 2016<\/a> that we hope will bring together members of the School community from all over the world, renewing engagement in the School and its future.<\/p>\n

As part of building the School\u2019s foundations, we have been working on reinvigorating our leadership team. We have consolidated education under an associate dean of education,<\/a> Professor Lisa Sullivan, and searched for and recruited professor Michael McClean as associate dean of research and faculty advancement<\/a>. We have also recently announced the recruitment of professor Yvette Cozier as assistant dean of diversity and inclusion<\/a>. All our deans are working on strengthening their particular portfolios, and I look forward to the work emerging from the various areas under these deans\u2019 purview in the coming year. We are currently looking for an associate dean of administration. On the department and center front, we welcomed Professor Thea to leadership of CGHD, and Professor Josee Dupuis as ad interim<\/em> chair of biostatistics. We are currently looking for chairs of the departments of HLPM and GH. Both searches will get underway shortly (with formal announcement to follow) and will be active over the course of the coming academic year.<\/p>\n

As one other set of foundational activities, we conducted a simplification of our Annual Faculty Review (AFR) this year. Under Dean McClean\u2019s leadership, and in close partnership with the Faculty Senate, we will now move towards a full redo of the AFR for the coming year, becoming part of a comprehensive annual look at ourselves that we are calling the Annual School Assessment. Components of the annual assessment will be the annual faculty review, staff review, and leadership review, complemented by an annual school survey\u2014to be launched in the fall\u2014which will anonymously survey all members of our community, including faculty, staff, students, and alumni.<\/p>\n

We have also started to look ahead to our upcoming accreditation and academic program reviews in 2018. Under the leadership of Vanessa Edouard, director of strategic education, a broad range of members of the School\u2019s GC and other leaders of units across the School have been working to clearly articulate metrics that will serve as the backbone of our accreditation in three years\u2019 time. We shall share those with the School community once they are in place.<\/p>\n

Research, Education, and Translation<\/h3>\n

At core, our foundational work exists to help us achieve our mission. It is therefore towards the goal of achieving excellence in knowledge generation, transmission, and translation that we have been strengthening our foundations as described here. I anticipate that we shall see many more developments in our research, education, and translational portfolios over the coming year, and I look forward to discussing them together as they evolve. In particular, I see the strategic thinking exercise as being critically informative of the work that we will be doing in each of these areas going forward. Meanwhile though, a brief sketch of what we have done and have set in motion on research, education, and translation.<\/p>\n

Starting on research, it is worth noting that this work is done by the faculty of the School and that the School\u2019s role is principally to optimize the conditions\u2014ranging from the intellectual to the logistical\u2014to ensure that the faculty have the tools they need to succeed. To that end, under Dean McClean\u2019s leadership, we have been working on strengthening various aspects of our faculty development efforts, including the consolidation of faculty discretionary funds, and I anticipate that we will have a richer and denser set of efforts to support junior faculty in their work to be unveiled over the coming months. Aiming to strengthen our faculty body, we have also set in motion mechanisms to recruit new faculty to strengthen areas of the School where we need to deepen our scholarship. We have recruited some outstanding faculty to join our numbers over the past few months\u2014I shall leave announcement of particulars to the department chairs\u2014and have several more recruitments lined up. I would anticipate that when on board, the chairs of HLPM and GH will also lead faculty recruitments in those areas. Not directly related to research, but placed here since it pertains to faculty advancement, under Professor George Annas\u2019 leadership we have also been revising our Appointments and Promotions (A+P) guidelines to fully recognize our multiple faculty tracks, including unmodified, research, clinical, lecturer, and practice tracks, as equally important to our School\u2019s fabric and operation. I shall also present these revised A+P guidelines at the September school assembly.<\/p>\n

On education, our biggest ongoing project, which has involved a large number of members of our whole School community, is our planned renewed MPH curriculum to launch in the fall of 2016. We have written about this previously<\/a>, and I am\u2014as I know many of our staff, students, faculty, and alumni are\u2014tremendously excited about this cutting-edge curriculum that prepares students for the public health roles they will be engaging in in the future. I am grateful to Dean Sullivan for her leadership in our efforts towards the new BU MPH. Meanwhile, we are slowly laying the foundation for our expansion in two areas in education: lifelong learning and a deepening of our master of science programs. We have had an overwhelming chorus of calls for renewed energy in these areas from our School community, and we are moving ahead, all the while being attentive to thoughts emerging from the strategic thinking exercise as to how best to engage in these area so as to ensure we stay true to our vision and aspirations, and also find the right competitive market niche. More on both of these areas will be coming in the next few months.<\/p>\n

On translation, we have redoubled our effort to engage ourselves with the broader public health conversation, both through broad dissemination of our SPH This Month publication and with efforts to be unfurled in the next few months. These efforts will both bring the public health conversation actively and dynamically to our School community and also make sure that as we do so, we have a chance to inflect and influence the broader public health conversation. In the fall, we will launch a full suite of dean\u2019s level events, including public health fora, seminars on contemporary public health issues, and expert symposia. The former two will be monthly, the latter quarterly. The first symposium, \u201cBeyond Ferguson: Social injustice and the Health of the Public,\u201dwill be held in February and is being hosted by Dean Harold Cox. I am tremendously excited about the conversation to be generated by these symposia and by our greater engagement with the broader conversational currents in the field. Also under Dean Cox\u2019s leadership, we are moving closer to launching our Public Health Activist Lab, giving texture and traction to our ideas first articulated in a Dean\u2019s Note<\/a> in March that will help us bridge the gap between our academic work and action that indeed improves the health of the public.<\/p>\n

I realize that a recitation of what we have done and where we are headed perhaps suffers from prose dryness. It is hard to convey the dynamism and energy of the School community in writing. I hope, however, that this note conveys my enthusiasm for our School\u2019s commitment to the agenda of academic public health, and for the potential of the School of Public Health to contribute to that agenda. That we have so much in the works, and that we can together articulate and realize the next step in our School\u2019s evolution, is an extraordinary testament to the vibrancy of this community.<\/p>\n

We will be devoting the September school assembly to an explication of steps we are taking on each of these areas, as well as a discussion of all of them. I very much look forward to that discussion. Meanwhile, I welcome, as always, any and all comments and thoughts.<\/p>\n

I hope everyone has a terrific week. Until next week.<\/p>\n

Warm regards,<\/p>\n

Sandro<\/p>\n

Sandro Galea, MD, DrPH
\nDean and Professor, Boston University School of Public Health
\nTwitter: @sandrogalea<\/a><\/p>\n

Previous Dean\u2019s Notes are archived at: https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sph\/category\/news\/deans-notes\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A summer pause to reflect on what we have done since the beginning of the year, and a look ahead at the next academic year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8472,"featured_media":59530,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"bu_prepress_billboard":"","_bu_prepress_primary_term":"","_bu_prepress_primary_term_manual":""},"tags":[1729],"bu-publication":[3516],"sphnews-article-category":[3519,3527,3531],"sphnews-topic":[],"bu_edition":[],"media_type":[],"profile_tax":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sph\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/bu-article\/71473"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sph\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/bu-article"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sph\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/bu-article"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sph\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8472"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sph\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=71473"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sph\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/bu-article\/71473\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":174462,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sph\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/bu-article\/71473\/revisions\/174462"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sph\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/59530"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sph\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=71473"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sph\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=71473"},{"taxonomy":"bu-publication","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sph\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/bu-publication?post=71473"},{"taxonomy":"sphnews-article-category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sph\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/sphnews-article-category?post=71473"},{"taxonomy":"sphnews-topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sph\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/sphnews-topic?post=71473"},{"taxonomy":"bu_edition","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sph\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/bu_edition?post=71473"},{"taxonomy":"media_type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sph\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media_type?post=71473"},{"taxonomy":"profile_tax","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sph\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/profile_tax?post=71473"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}