Dear BUSPH,

Welcome back to school, and to the start of 2025. I have the honor, as your new interim Dean, of leading BUSPH into a new year and a new era. Let me introduce myself.

I am a convert to public health. My scientific life began in the world of medicine where I trained as a primary care doctor. When I taught and did my research in a medical school environment, I knew little about public health—its work, its mission, its practitioners, its ethos—the methods of building a healthier population. Now, eight years after arriving at BUSPH, although I still practice medicine, I am a believer in the wide powers and deep insights of public health.

As this week marks the official start of a new role for me at BUSPH as Dean ad interim, I am delighted to work with you all on some new projects, moving us in new directions with the hope of making a school that is now a consistently, solidly top-ten public health school even better.

I will be shifting into this new position from the job I was originally hired for: Chair of the Department of Health Law, Policy and Management (HLPM). The heterogeneity of the faculty of HLPM—consisting of economists, sociologists, lawyers, social workers, health services researchers, with past lives as government officials, hospital administrators consultants, litigators – was a microcosm of the wide assortment of faculty we have at BUSPH across our six departments.

The primary work of the school—in concert with the production of new knowledge that necessarily seeps into our classrooms—is to teach a new generation how to think about making the world healthier. Across our 9 functional MPH certificates, BUSPH has more on-campus students than any other public health school in the country

I will not be an interim Dean who merely “keeps the lights on.” I am, by nature, competitive. The youngest of four children, pounded by siblings during snowball fights—perhaps the origin of my dislike of winter weather—I like to keep moving, looking for new angles to strike. BUSPH has been on a snowball’s soaring trajectory over my years here and anyone who knows me knows that I have little interest in stasis. It seems clear that our upward trajectory must continue if we are to hold our place among the most important public health school nationally. In 2025, the world needs the best work of public health more than ever.

I, we, have learned much from Dean Sandro Galea, working with the incredibly talented and dedicated Associate Deans Andrade, Cozier, Lazic, McClean, and Sullivan, who have put us in motion. In his ten years at BUSPH, Dean Galea and team reimagined the school. Incorporating the best ideas of the entire BUSPH community, we have developed a series of strategy maps (the newest out this month) and pushed in new strategic directions. We have new initiatives, like our new Center for Health Data Science, the Center for Climate Health and the Center for Trauma and Mental Health. Our faculty is young and eager; incredibly, 57% of the current faculty was hired during this decade, and this new generation now conducts some of the nation’s most impactful health research. In the last decade we have revised our teaching curriculum to guide the next generation through rigorous training, and BUSPH is now considered an innovator in public health teaching. We have pointed students, staff and faculty toward work in the community, the practice of public health, promoting a DO perspective. The BUSPH community is now even larger with students across the country and world in our Online MPH program. None of this would have happened without Dean Galea. Thank you again, Sandro, and we look forward to hearing the buzz from St. Louis in the years ahead.

There is more to do here though. We find ourselves at an extraordinary moment of challenge and opportunity. We have lived through a pandemic that has broadened, for better and worse, the public’s view of public health. The pandemic’s effects have been far reaching, causing the deaths of a million Americans and, in its way, bringing down two presidencies. There are certainly more changes to come as our politics turns rightward and, perhaps, inward. As a school, we need to maintain our commitment to scientific excellence and attention to equity. We need to speak up for scientists, and the importance of science as we know it: systematic and skeptical in its approach, always aiming at well-defined evidence and conceptual clarity.

As a school, we also need to continue to innovate, to engage beyond our campus walls.  In that regard, I am announcing here my Dean’s Innovation Challenge. The Challenge is meant to stimulate quick-start, short-term, creative, collaborative projects that are especially well-positioned to capture attention outside the University during my term as interim Dean. My hope is that others in Boston and around the world will get a different look at what we’re up to as a school community. I welcome and encourage proposals from faculty, staff, or students, activities that must be led by members of at least two of these categories. We will select up to four projects by end of February for funding in the amount of $10,000 per award to cover project-related expenses. More details are forthcoming later this week via SPH Today.

Let me end today’s note where I began: I am a convert from medicine to public health in focus and identity. Converts are zealots. I am an enthusiast for public health. I want to bring out and push forward the best for our school as we head toward BUSPH’s 50th birthday in 2026. As interim Dean, I will try to learn something new every day. I can’t imagine a better place to do that.

Michael Stein, M.D.
Interim Dean
Boston University School of Public Health
mdstein@bu.edu

 

 

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