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First Graduate M.P.H. Program in Russia Opens with the Assistance of the Yale School of Public Health’s Center for Interdisciplinary Research on AIDS St. Petersburg State University (SPSU) in St. Petersburg, Russia is the first Russian university to establish a graduate program in public health. SPSU developed its M.P.H. program mainly through collaboration with the Yale School of Public Health’s Center for Interdisciplinary Research on AIDS (CIRA) and ten other universities in the United States and Europe, which offer graduate training in public health. A ceremony to honor the opening of the M.P.H. program was held at SPSU on September 12, 2005.
The public health program at SPSU was established through financial support provided over a three year period to CIRA and the other participating universities by the Fogarty International Center (FIC) of the National Institutes of Health. Following a planning workshop for the public health program’s development in early 2002, thirty faculty from SPSU participated in courses at the collaborating universities and used this knowledge and experience to develop courses at SPSU in the areas of epidemiology, biostatistics, health administration, environmental health sciences, social and behavioral sciences and bioethics. “I have no doubt that this innovative, multidisciplinary degree granting M.P.H. Program is going to reap great benefit to SPSU, to the Northwest region of Russia and to the entire Russian Federation and nearby countries,” said Michael H. Merson, M.D., Anna M.R. Lauder Professor of Public Health in Yale School of Public Health’s Division of Global Health and Director of CIRA, in his speech commemorating the opening of the program. Merson is the Principal Investigator of an FIC-funded AIDS International Training and Research Program (AITRP), which has been undertaken with SPSU and the Biomedical Center in St. Petersburg for the past seven years. A trained public health workforce is urgently needed in Russia to implement programs that will help prevent HIV, tuberculosis, obesity, tobacco-related diseases, alcohol-related diseases, and other causes of high morbidity and premature mortality in the country. Public health training in Russia has been previously offered primarily at the undergraduate level through Departments of Social Hygiene, and for the most part has been inadequate in teaching disciplines at the core of public health.
“I expect that (the SPSU M.P.H. Program) is going to stimulate the development of similar programs in other (Russian) Universities, and enhance discussions about the value and importance of modern public health at all levels of government,” commented Merson. The future of the M.P.H. Program should be “one that is firmly based on the traditions, beliefs and norms of Russian society, while using modern concepts and approaches in ways that best suit your needs and epidemiological situation.” The two-year M.P.H program has matriculated 22 students in the first year class out of the 40 applicants who applied for admission. The curriculum will be taught by 58 faculty members in seven departments at SPSU. The program plans to matriculate 15-30 students per year by 2007 and by 2010, it hopes to enroll 50-100 students per year. All students need to complete a masters’ thesis prior to graduation related to a research project which they undertake while in the program. Other institutions involved in the establishment of the program are the University of Alabama, Birmingham; Case Western Reserve University; Emory University; Finnish Institute of Occupational Health; University of Illinois; Johns Hopkins University; London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine; University of North Carolina; State University of New York, Albany; and State University of New York, Downstate Medical Center. —Story by Marcie Foley |
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