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Graduates Urged to “Innovate” a New Public Health Network
“Our graduates today are going to be facing some pretty big problems,” stated Julie L. Gerberding, M.D., Ph.D., Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the Yale School of Public Health’s 2007 Commencement speaker. “I regret that those of us who’ve been in the profession for a long time have not left you a legacy of a world that truly is safe and healthy for everyone.” Illustrating global adversities such as more than a billion people in the world living in extreme poverty, how climate change may shape our world unpredictably, air contamination, and urgent threats and realities such as cancer, cardiovascular disease, and stroke, Dr. Gerberding told the 119 graduates, their families, faculty and staff gathered in Battell Chapel on May 28, that the size of the problems facing the world are not the only challenge the graduates will have to address. They will face the challenge of high expectations. “People increasingly expect you, and the organizations that you will work for, to be flawless. They want you to be able to do everything perfectly, in real time, when they want it, where they want it and how they want it done.” More importantly, Dr. Gerberding said, “people are asking you to do this with less and less resources at your disposal.” Addressing the graduates, she stated that the combination of the problems the world is confronting, high expectations, and the lack of resources adds up to “cheaper, better, faster” which “is not a good formula for success, unless you do one thing…and that is innovate. We are going to have to find new and better solutions to solving these problems than we’ve had at our disposal in the past,” she said.
Applying the concept of ideagora, the integration of ideas across sectors, Dr. Gerberding, the Administrator of the Agency of Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, discussed how success cannot be achieved by only collaborating with other public health professionals. “The public health practice of 2007 and beyond has to be built from a different framework than the public health practice that worked in 1950. The innovation that our graduates are going to have to come to grips with, is the innovation required to address health challenges in this new, very fast, very connected, and sometimes flat world of health threats.” The new public health practice network has“software” that Dr. Gerberding said is necessary. The software includes the formal education the graduates received at the Yale School of Public Health, fast science, new ideas, and the critical concept of public engagement. “The new public health has to not be about the public as an amorphoused collection of population statistics,” stated Dr. Gerberding, “but it has to be the sum of the individual people whose ideas, beliefs, and needs, and creativity, and hope and optimism come together to help us build a collective future that is safer and healthier than the one that many people are experiencing now.” Values were Dr. Gerberding’s final key ingredients to the software of the new public health. Citing the CDC’s core values of respect, integrity and accountability, she informed the audience of broader values that she finds critical to accept as public health professionals:
She concluded, “We are all learners and leaders, and with the start that you have from this wonderful university, I predict that you will go on to learn and lead our world into truly a safer and healthier future for everyone.” Paul D. Cleary, Ph.D., Dean of Public Health, Chair and C-E.A. Winslow Professor of Epidemiology and Public Health, noted that even though we have made enormous progress, we still face daunting challenges such as AIDS, the threat of bioterrorism, and the global threat posed by environmental contamination and emerging infections such as avian influenza. He urged this year’s graduates to plan their “strategies and find the solutions for our health crises at home and worldwide.” “Having met you,” he continued, “I am heartened by your skill and commitment to solving these and the many other challenges facing us.”
Lubna Shamsi, a student in the Division of Health Policy and Administration, delivered the student address. She stated how she realized in her second year that she and her peers were not given the solutions to the issues of the world to implement upon commencement. She told her fellow graduates, they were “trained with the tools necessary to think about and create the solutions that are needed to address these complex problems we have been introduced to.” She added, “It is very important that we use these skills we have acquired over the last two years to create integrative solutions to emerging problems.”
Several awards were presented at the School’s ceremony. The Award for Excellence in Teaching was conferred upon Robert Dubrow, M.D., Ph.D., Associate Professor in the Division of Chronic Disease Epidemiology and Director of Medical Studies. He thanked the graduates for the award, and told them how their “energy, idealism, and commitment to public health” gives him hope for the future of the world. The Dean’s Prizes for Outstanding M.P.H. Thesis were given to Martin Andersen for Regional Variation in Disparities in Cancer Care, Anne Reiner for Analysis of U.S. Female and Male Breast Cancer, and David Thomas for A Comparison of Tsetse Wolbachia-induced Cytoplasmic Incompatibility Models for Tyrpanosmiasis Control. The Henry J. Chauncey Jr. Inspiration Award was given to Seamus Collins and the Cortlandt Van Rensselaer Creed Award was presented to René Herbert. Dean Cleary presented the graduates with their diplomas after the presentation of the awards, and recognized EPH’s 12 Ph.D. and 2 M.S. in Biostatistics graduates, who received their degrees from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. —Story by Marcie Foley |
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