To our Brown School of Public Health community,

It is great to be back. And it has been so exciting to learn about all that has been accomplished these past months. I write today to share some reflections as I return to Brown.

First, I have been wowed by how much our school, and its faculty, staff, and students, have accomplished over the past 16 months—it has been a fantastic team effort. And leadership truly matters, which is why I am profoundly grateful to Ron Aubert for his skilled and thoughtful stewardship of the school in my absence. Ron’s steady leadership has allowed our school to continue and consolidate its rapid growth, build on areas of strength, support internal and external community building, and address challenges. I am thrilled Ron has agreed to continue to lead a key component of the school’s growth as senior associate dean for education.

I also want to thank Executive Dean Sara Walsh for her steadfast work, often behind the scenes. Sara has continued to drive the School of Public Health’s transformation, building strong organizational structures, sound financial practices, and making sure that we are organizationally ready to continue our growth.

And the person I’m missing today is Megan Ranney. She played a larger than life role here at Brown – not just in the past 16 months – but for nearly two decades. The world of public health is better off because she now gets to go work her magic at Yale. But we will miss her tremendously and are grateful for what she did for Brown and for what she’s already done for public health.

I have been learning about the great work of our faculty, staff, and students. While it is all too much to cover in this note (though the Continuum Magazine team has highlighted many efforts and accomplishments), I’d like to share my great pride in hearing about the first graduating class of Health Equity Scholars, and my personal regret that I could not join them or the rest of our graduating class of 2023, to celebrate at Brown’s 255th commencement.

This summer will be an opportunity both to take stock of where we stand as a school, and to plan next steps to ensure we continue to be effective—in our research, teaching, and communications—to address the most significant public health needs as they emerge and evolve.

My work in the White House reinforced for me the urgency and enormity of the public health challenges we face as a nation and around the world. Our school is uniquely poised to meet these challenges. One of the most urgent and acute of these is rebuilding trust in public health institutions, which has been dangerously eroded during the COVID-19 pandemic.

To restore confidence in public health, we must continue to practice good science, and communicate our findings effectively and honestly, in ways that are fit for purpose in our rapidly evolving information environment. We must also continue to reach out to and work with communities: meeting them where they are, listening and learning from them, and serving their health needs and priorities.

As I reflect on the last 3 years of the pandemic, it is easy to point out the shortcomings of public health. A highly under-resourced community of scholars and practitioners certainly made some mistakes. That is true. But what is remarkable to me is how much public health did get right – and how much we all learned in the last 3 years.

We built life-saving vaccines and got nearly three-fourths of humanity vaccinated.

We built treatments in record time that are widely available.

We learned that telemedicine is quite effective at providing care.

We innovated with new ways of getting care to people where they are with test-to-treat programs that sent vans into neighborhoods to care for people directly.

We learned you can partner with barbershops and churches to get people vaccinated by building trust with important messengers.

We learned that if you make equity a priority, you can close vaccination gaps and treatment gaps and even the gaps in outcomes.

And we learned the importance of indoor air quality—and how we can make it better—to protect all of us against respiratory pathogens.

These are just a few of the lessons that emerged: lessons that we must advance as the pandemic recedes. Our job will be to ensure that everything public health did right is captured and understood and propagated well beyond COVID-19 to all the challenges we face as a country and as a world.

I am excited to get to work with you on building on the great work of the school and continuing to tackle the new frontiers in public health. Until then, I hope the summer is restful and regenerative, and I look forward to gathering in person when the academic year begins.

Sincerely,

Ashish K. Jha, MD, MPH
Dean, School of Public Health