Message From The Dean
University of Maryland College Park School of Public Health
It has been yet another exciting and eventful year in the University of Maryland, College Park School of Public Health. We are continuing to grow in many important ways. Last spring we graduated our largest, and by all measures, our most talented class of students. Our Departments of Family
Science, Kinesiology, and Public
and Community Health continue to be highly regarded in their fields as represented by high rankings of excellence in those fields. Our new Departments
of Epidemiology & Biostatistics, Health
Services Administration, and the Maryland
Institute for Applied Environmental Health are also now in place and have admitted students into their programs.
I would like to take this time to congratulate two newly promoted faculty in the Department of Kinesiology. Dr. David Andrews and Dr. Deborah Young were each promoted from associate professor to full professor with tenure. I congratulate each of them and their department.
We continue to grow as a school. Our undergraduate student population has grown by almost 60% in five years, from 757 undergraduate majors to now almost 1200. Our graduate student population has remained strong and steady in size over the same period of time—but our percentage of part-time students has been reduced slightly and our percentage of full-time graduate students has grown. Perhaps most importantly, our 5-year graduation rate is 85.2% compared with overall campus rate of 72.2%.
There are also many new and exciting changes we are going through and can anticipate. We were charged by the University to create a public institution school of public health on the University of Maryland College Park Campus. Over the past 24 months, much has been accomplished. As of now we are recognized as such—and our next graduating class will get their degrees from the University of Maryland, College Park School of Public Health. It is important to state that no existing degree program currently operating in the school will be eliminated, nor will any current student be required to change majors. All currently enrolled students will still have full access to the curriculum in which they were admitted when they first came. But, we are adding new opportunities as a result of our change.
What is a “school of public health” and what does it mean for us, for the campus, and the University System of Maryland? Public health is “what we as a society do collectively to assure the conditions in which people can be healthy.” 1 We do this by addressing the behavioral, social, physical, mental and environmental health concerns of communities and populations at risk for disease and injury. This mission is achieved by applying the broad array of health promotion and disease prevention strategies designed to improve and enhance quality of life. Our mission here will be to specifically address the full range of behavioral, social, environmental, and policy science determinants of health and quality of life across the life span. We will do this in part by continuing to do high quality basic to applied research in all the disciplines that support our efforts. These determinants account for more than 70 percent of the excess morbidity and mortality in the world today. This means that 7 in 10 people who suffer from disease, disability, or who die earlier in life than expected, do so from immediate causes that are preventable or which can be delayed.
For our school, these changes will mean access to new faculty, research scientists, and staff to support all of our efforts. Last year I reported that we added several new faculty and administrative staff to the school. This year we have added additional faculty and staff. We are forging new relationships between ourselves and other colleges and schools on campus, and between our school and other Universities in the state and region. For students this means access to a broader range of courses offered by talented faculty in addition to our existing talented faculty. It also means new opportunities for mentoring by a broader range of faculty and researchers. It also means greater likelihood of a richer diversity in student backgrounds in our classes—which always adds value to classroom instruction. For faculty it represents new opportunities for greater support and collaboration across and within disciplines. We are encouraged by the opportunities, but recognize the challenges that still lie ahead of us.
I encourage you to review the details that follow on these and many other components of our new School of Public Health.
Robert S. Gold, Dean
- Institute of Medicine, Committee for the Study of the Future of Public Health, Division of Health Care Services. 1988. The Future of Public Health. National Academy Press, Washington, DC.
Robert
S. Gold, PhD, DrPH, FASHA, FAAHB
Dean, School of Public Health
Bldg. 255 Valley Drive College Park,
MD 20742
301.405.2437
