A little background

I am late writing this week. I got back from CDC meeting late last Thursday and left for the ASPH/APHA meetings in San Diego Saturday morning. The plane ride was interesting, because a number of people on it were going to the meetings, and we had a chance to catch up with one another. An extremely well-behaved detection dog had a seat a few rows back. I always love to be in the company of dogs!

ASPH meeting

I really appreciate the opportunity to meet with fellow deans. Although we compete on some levels, it also is an incredibly thoughtful, supportive group, and I look forward to seeing people who are colleagues and friends. We worry about a lot of the same things—bringing in money, recruiting the best students, and supporting faculty and staff. I’ve joined the diversity committee, chaired by Marla Gold, Dean, Drexel University, because the topic is so important, and I decided to become part of the solution. We had fascinating discussions in the overall session about global health and about the role of schools of public health in global health. Our School’s name change precipitated a lot of discussion about names. Clearly, a lot of people think we got it right in modifying public health with the word global.

Serendipity at the gym

When I travel, I really like to go to local grocery stores and gyms. Makes me feel like I am not merely a visitor, and one really gets a better feel for places that way (plus saving money by shopping at the grocery instead of eating out all the time). I have a terrible sense of geographic direction, and I walked out at 5:30 a.m. in search of one gym and could not find it but saw a gym called The Burn Fitness and decided to see if I could get a day pass since time was moving fast. Well, it turned out to be a fascinating experience. It is a small, local gym with two great owner-trainers who let me work out there as a courtesy. Everyone who walked in was a regular, and it had the most amazing sense of intimacy I’ve ever seen. Already, I liked the place! I walked in and got on a cycle and a man across the way asked where I was from and my name. I told him and then he asked what I did which led to a spirited discussion about public health. He asked great questions about the role of policies and the potential value of closer collaborations with legal folks. Turns out he is the city attorney for San Diego and exuberant about politics. After I told him I was attending the ASPH meeting and we talked a little, he said, “So what is ASPH going to do to improve the health of the U.S.?” It was one of those aha moments that really concentrated my mind on impact. What are we doing as a School, what are we doing as an Association? I had a chance to raise the issue later in the day when ASPH had Georges C. Benjamin, MD, FACP, FACEP (Emeritus), Executive Director, APHA, as a guest speaker. And Jim Marks, MD, MPH, senior Vice President and Director, Health Group, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, unveiled a new program on public health and the law to spearhead more work in the policy arena.

We may be on the cusp of one of those moments of convergence when we actually could do something amazing to improve health if we all can get past our individual agendas and pull together for something greater and potentially much more long lasting. There was such a sense of excitement in the air as I walked through the Marriott last night on the way to the UNC alumni reception. It really feels like public health’s time has come.

UNC alumni reception

Thanks to Cutler Andrews, Steve Couch and others in External Affairs, we had a great turnout.  It’s always amazing to walk into a room of wall-to-wall UNC SPH alumni, faculty and staff. I met many people I hadn’t met before, and that was great. So many people doing really interesting things and students I’ve mentored are doing well. Multiple people came up and told me how good they felt about the School’s direction, and that was great to hear! And over and over, I heard stories about how important it was to our alumni when they applied to the SPH that one of the student services managers went out of their way to get them applications, be a sounding board and offer flexibility. Our alumni are an amazing force for good in the world and also a powerful social networking group to help one another and help the School. In my remarks, I mentioned that we are going to devote the first $40,000 from the Annual Fund to scholarships for our students, and the more we raise, the more we will devote to students.

That’s all for now. I’m on my way to San Francisco to meet with some alumni there. And, naturally, the plane’s delayed. Happy Tuesday. Barbara

Kill my blog?

I read an article by Paul Boutin in Wired.  In “Twitter, Flickr, Facebook Make Blogs Look So 2004,” Boutin argues that “cut-rate journalists and underground marketing campaigns have drowned out authentic voices of amateur wordsmiths. He went on to argue that it’s a better use of time to use much pithier vehicles like Flickr, Facebook or Twitter.  I thought about this and wondered if, by the time I joined the blogosphere (nearly a year ago), it was on its way to being passé.  I like writing, my voice is mine, I’m not a journalist, and this blog is definitely not sponsored.  So, I’m going to keep an open mind.  If at any point, it feels as though I’m a voice without an audience, well, there’s a big pile of work waiting.

I voted Friday

Friday, I walked over to Morehead and voted.  I don’t think I’ve been this excited to vote since the first time.  Early voting is a great thing, and for people who live in Orange County, it’s so convenient to be able to vote on the campus.

Start!Triangle Heart Walk

A member of UNC departments and our School helped out with this year’s American Heart Association Heart Walk which began at the Imperial Hotel.  A lot of people from our Gillings School of Global Public Health were there, including Julie MacMillan, MPH, who put in a lot of effort encouraging people to sign up, and Kathryn Johnson, Viktor Bovbjerg, PhD, MPH, Peggy Dean Glenn, Francesca Florey, MA,  Jerry Salak, Kathy Barboriak, PhD, Amy Hitlin, MEd, Dave Potenziani, PhD, and many more.  We walked with Linda Sanders, who works at IBM and is on our Acceleration Advisory Committee, and my husband Bernard. (In the picture are me (blocking Julie), Viktor and Linda.)

Julie, Linda, Viktor, Bernard and I were quite a way towards the end of the line which included thousands of walkers, some with baby carriages, some with dogs of all sizes and one tiny dog and a toddler in a carriage.  We were going nowhere fast when Julie and I looked at each other and decided to reverse directions.

Now, before you think we cheated, we were no Rosie Ruiz’s trying to win the NYC marathon by taking the subway.  It definitely wasn’t a speed race. No, we just wanted to walk at a fast enough pace to get a heart walk.  So, we headed out in reverse direction so we could accelerate.  We had even more fun than the people who were happily strolling along.  It was great fun when people along the way would say, “You’re going the wrong way.” And we’d say, “We know.”  Sometimes, you can go a lot faster by changing direction!

Budget woes

The global financial crisis is trickling down to universities.  In the last two weeks, we’ve gotten two consecutive 2% budget cuts (non-recurring).  There’s little fat in UNC budgets; this is really hard.

This week

Tuesday, I’m off to Atlanta where I’ll co-chair the CDC’s Task Force on Community Preventive Services.  Then it’s back to North Carolina and on to California for ASPH’s Annual Meeting, alumni receptions and meetings with some of our California alumni.

Happy Monday!

The game

What can one say about beating Notre Dame! Wow, it was fabulous and just wonderful to see the enormous sea of blue on a Carolina blue day.

Awards luncheon  

It was a wonderful honor and great fun to accompany Dr. Leah Devlin, State Health Director and Director, NC Department of Health, to the awards luncheon where she was recognized as one of this year’s Distinguished Alumni. Leah is a wonderful person and a great role model. She has continued North Carolina’s tradition of being one of the most innovative departments of health in the U.S. I am proud that she is an MPH graduate of the School. Leah also is on the School’s Foundation Board and has been a generous donor to our School.

A previous award winner, also there today, Jane Smith Patterson, is on our Advisory Council.

Listening to the accomplishments of the award winners made me even prouder to be at UNC-Chapel Hill.

Installation of Chancellor Thorp 

I am told it is always Carolina blue on University Day. And it was! The day sparkled. For those of you who were not there, President Bowles and others praised the staff, students and faculty at UNC. Hear my applause! A large crowd attended, including a number of leaders from other universities, and chancellors within the UNC system.  I enjoyed meeting Chancellor Ponder from UNC-Asheville.

I was very impressed by Chancellor Thorp’s address. He talked about some of the important milestones in UNC history, including its integration and first admission of women. I especially appreciated that he echoed some of our themes, including water and global health. He drew the image of an even more interdisciplinary university, in which a student studying Mandarin might be working on a global health project. He stressed the importance of a global vision and local service. He mentioned public health several times. There is no question that our School is in synch with the future of UNC-Chapel Hill.

In an interview reported Sunday in the Durham Herald-Sun, Chancellor Thorp said, Mr. Davie had a pretty extraordinary idea when he devised public higher education and that was to create an institution which would try to do two things at once.

One was to aspire to the highest academic standards globally and the other was to serve a single state. It’s hard to do either one of those two things. We have the mandate to do both.”

No School at UNC has a greater responsibility than we do to serve the state. As Dennis Gillings, CBE, put it a couple weeks ago, we must think globally and serve locally. I believe this School needs to engage in real dialogue, not just among ourselves but with the State, about how best to do this.

As we celebrate the new Chancellor, we should honor and thank James and Susan Moeser for their leadership and support of our School.

The budget

We are about to implement a 2% cut in University budgets. We have one week to indicate how we will apply them. There’s no good way to do this, especially since our School already operates on a lean margin, but we’ll do our best.

Passings

Over the weekend, former HPM faculty member and Sheps research fellow Michelle Mayer, PhD died of scleroderma. She waged a long, painful battle with this formidable disease. In the process, she taught even those of us who did not know her something about courage and looking death in the eye, through her blog and the recent articles she wrote about being a patient. We all can learn from the example she set.

Allan Rosenfield, dean for 20 years at Columbia Mailman School of Public Health,  died peacefully Saturday morning after an illness of several years. Dr. Rosenfield was an amazingly influential global leader in reproductive health. A couple years ago I went to New York city for a Doctors Without Borders celebration of Dr. Rosenfield. In true New York style, even Alicia Keys was there to sing his praises. His death is a loss to the world.

Another Monday. Have a good week! Barbara

This morning

I am writing this on a magnificent Carolina blue Sunday morning, the morning after a winning Carolina football game. Walking back from the gym, I noticed the intensity of the sky and the clear contrasts with the many magnificent purple and yellow flowers planted throughout the neighborhood. Pumpkins look great and remind us that another magnificent Halloween celebration is just around the corner. For those of you new to Chapel Hill, get ready. There is nothing even comparable to a Chapel Hill celebration. There is a lot of evil in the world, and the economic situation in the U.S. is frightening, but right here, right now, it is a beautiful morning. While I have been known to criticize Carolina blue for not being intense enough, today, I get it.

Last week

Thanks again to the several people who helped me prepare for a keynote talk last week at the National Human Genome Research Institute (mentioned last week). Preparing for the talk made me even more aware of the many disciplines that now contribute to understanding genomics. We in public health should continue to anticipate how we can apply genomics to improve public health.

One of my students, Jennifer Gierisch, successfully defended her dissertation last week. Congratulations to Jennifer and thanks to HBHE Interim Chair Jo Anne Earp, ScD for chairing the committee and being a great mentor and to Cathy Zimmer, MA (Odom Institute), Celette Skinner, PhD (University of Texas Southwestern), and Noel Brewer, PhD (HBHE), for serving on Jennifer’s committee along with me. In her remarks, Jennifer said that it takes a village for a student to complete a dissertation. It’s true. It is not just the committee, but the student’s colleagues, family, faculty outside the committee and more. Observing Jennifer made me think about a few of the characteristics that helped her complete the journey successfully. Here are a few observations for the benefit of other students.

• Master the discipline: Of course, one has to know the basic theory and skills of the discipline one is studying. That’s obvious. But there are related disciplines as well. Students who stretch to acquire critical 21st century skills, such as new statistical methods, will get more from the experience.

• Be disciplined: The dissertation won’t write itself. I remember getting up at 5am every day when I was a grad student and writing at least something. Students have different ways of dealing with timelines, but the ones who finish in a reasonable period of time seem to have clear timelines and interim deadlines.

• Don’t be afraid to ask for help: A lot about the experience of a dissertation is solitary. One has to write the chapters. It seems to me that students who know when to ask for help and seek it actively do better. There are a lot of people in our School who want to help. Don’t be afraid to ask.

• Work at writing: Everyone can become a better writer. It’s one of the most important skills of an academic. People criticize me sometimes for the multiple drafts I go through to write papers, speeches and the like, but for most of us, good products don’t happen in a single draft. Subjecting one’s writing to scrutiny by others can be painful, but our products usually improve through the process. There is little I write that doesn’t go through review.

• Feel the passion: It’s hard to stick with something you’re not really excited about. Living the dissertation every day requires real passion. I was impressed by Jennifer’s enthusiasm about her topic. It takes that to keep at it.

• Get beyond your comfort zone: Whether it is pushing at the gym or learning a new statistical method, doing the dissertation is a great time to get beyond one’s comfort zone, to learn new skills and to get comfortable with the discomfort of not knowing everything. It’s good life skills training.

• Have a life: When he was recognized a couple weeks ago as our newest named professor, the Barbara Sorenson Hulka Distinguished Professor in Cancer Epidemiology, Professor Bob Millikan, PhD, DVM, MPH, talked about the fact that Barbara had asked him about his music and other interests early in his time at Carolina. No one can exist fully happy or satisfied with work alone. Family, pets, art, music, gardening, athletic interests, travel are just a few of the activities that drive our lives. Don’t give it all up to be a student, but keep it in balance.

Congratulating other students

I was thinking this morning as I walked along that I know when my students defend their dissertations, but I don’t know when other students defend successfully. It’s an accomplishment to celebrate, and I’d like to talk with our chairs about how to communicate this information to the School.

September 26th, one of our HBHE students, Dan Cothran, sent me an email about an event sponsored by UNC and Duke that was to occur at Duke the following Monday. He said, “Both you and Dr. Gillings emphasized the importance of local work with a global impact; the group hosting this event, Universities Allied for Essential Medicines (UAEM), is committed to the encouragement and facilitation of local-global connections. Specifically, UAEM works to ensure that medicines and technologies produced in whole or in part by UNC are available and affordable in developing countries; UAEM also seeks to increase the local effort dedicated to neglected diseases and to redefine research success.”

“The event, Advancing Global Health: Making University Innovations Available in Developing Countries, is a panel discussion about technology transfer at Duke and UNC, and how our universities might do more to improve global public health. Eminent UNC faculty members—Dr. Myron Cohen, Dr. Robert E. Johnston, and Mark Crowell, MRP—will be speaking at the event. ” Several Duke faculty also spoke, including Drs. Robert Cook-Deegan and Michael Merson. My husband and I attended the symposium. I was really impressed by the full auditorium of mostly students. Naman Shah, one of our MD-PhD candidates, also is one of the leaders of the UAEM, and it was good to see him there. Listening to Bob Johnston talk about his efforts to develop alternative models to discover and disseminate vaccines made me even more grateful that we are funding Bob and Ralph Baric, PhD to test some of their hypotheses and allow them to move forward. More of our students may want to get involved in UAEM.

I did leave with one question though. It seems as though more and more people in the U.S. cannot get medicines they need. Could the global efforts be applied locally as well?

Next week

Next week, Sunday October 12^th, is University Day. Join the celebrations. Holden Thorp, PhD will be installed as Chancellor in a formal celebration. One of our own, State Health Director and Director, Division of Public Health, NCDHHS, Leah Devlin, DDS, MPH will be recognized as a distinguished alumna.

Have a great week. Happy Monday. Barbara