PUBLIC HEALTH MATTERS

An Introduction, and a Challenge

In the new SPH series Public Health Matters, Dean Ad Interim Michael Stein will discuss issues of consequence for the school community and for the field at this critical moment for public health.

Welcome to the start of 2025. As dean ad interim, I have the honor of leading Boston University School of Public Health into a new year, and a new era—for the school and for the field of public health writ large.

But first, 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. This is, unfortunately, an all-too-common experience for medical degree holders. It is also in many ways reflective of the current moment. “Public health” has been relegated to the sidelines in favor of medicine or, at worse, vilified at a time when public health remains essential to our scientific enterprise and creating a healthier world.

I am the youngest of four children, pounded by siblings during snowball fights—perhaps the origin of my dislike of winter weather—and I like to keep moving, looking for new angles to strike. Thankfully, BUSPH has been on a snowball’s soaring trajectory over my eight years here. Although I still practice medicine, I am a believer in the wide powers and deep insights of public health. In fact, I am convinced more than ever that collective action is the solution to much of what ails us. 

I will be shifting into this new position from the job I was originally hired for: chair of the Department of Health Law, Policy & 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.

As this week marks the official start of my role as interim dean, I am delighted to work across the school, moving us in new directions with the hope of making a dynamic, nationally recognized school even better.

I—we—have learned much from Dean Sandro Galea, working with the incredibly talented and dedicated Associate Deans Craig Andrade, Yvette Cozier, Ira Lazic, Michael McClean, and Lisa 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 and pushed in new strategic directions. We have new initiatives, like our new Center for Health Data Science, the Center for Climate and Health and the Center for Trauma and Mental Health. Our faculty is young and eager; incredibly, 57 percent of the current faculty was hired during this decade, and this new generation now conducts some of the nation’s most impactful health research. 

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.  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.

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 more than 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 will maintain our commitment to scientific excellence and attention to equity. We will 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, we recently announced our Dean’s Innovation Challenge to spur collaboration across students, faculty, staff, and our local community. My hope is that the school’s commitment to innovation will help those in Boston and around the world get a different look at what we’re up to as a school community. I look forward to sharing the announcement of the winners of the Challenge and their projects in March.

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, MD

Dean Ad Interim
Boston University School of Public Health
mdstein@bu.edu