Welcome back students!

Glad students are back

Sunday was truly crazy in Chapel Hill, with students and families flooding Franklin Street. The excitement is palpable. Where’d the summer go? I am always invigorated when students start arriving in town and am really glad that students are back in our School. I look forward to interacting with a lot of you over the year. Feel free to email me any time or to give me feedback via this blog. I try really hard to answer every message, but every now and then, one slips through the cracks. If you don’t hear back from me in a couple of days, please follow up.

Diversity

Assistant Dean for Students, Felicia Mebane, and her staff held a day-long diversity session as part of orientation Saturday. It was great to meet some of the students who attended and to hear the perspectives of students and the campus diversity leaders who attended and spoke. Jessie Satia, Associate Professor of Epidemiology and Nutrition and Special Assistant to the Dean for Diversity, participated, along with a number of other faculty and staff from our School and the University. Terry Phoenix, director of the LGBTQ Center (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer), said to me afterwards that it says a lot about the School that we hold this session. We will talk a lot more about diversity as the year goes on. We cannot solve the world’s big public health challenges without a diverse workforce and sensitivity to diversity is critical to sustaining that workforce.

Reading

Thanks to Peggy Bentley for lending me the book, High Noon—20 Global Problems, 20 Years to Solve Them,

by J. F. Rischard (Basic Books, 2002). It’s a fascinating book. What’s really striking about the global problems mentioned is how many of them have health relevance: urbanization, food, energy, infectious diseases, fisheries depletion, biodiversity issues, maritime pollution, water scarcity, migration, aging populations and poverty all have health connections. The author made the point that solving problems will “take partnerships among government, business and civil society to solve intractable problems” (p.50). In public health, we have the chance to solve some of the greatest threats to survival in the 21st century. We must get better at forming creative partnerships that will permit us to develop scalable solutions to big public health problems.

Mouse report

Apparently, a lot of you have followed our mouse story with some interest. We caught several more mice which were subsequently deported outside the School (alive and well-fed). We all have become more educated about the urban mouse than we’d have liked. Hopefully, this installment is over or nearly over.

Michael Phelps is amazing!!!

To be honest, I get excited about the Olympics some years and not others. I loved seeing Carl Lewis run when the Olympics were in Atlanta. This year, they just haven’t overwhelmed me except for swimming, especially the potential for Dara Torres and the amazing Michael Phelps. What an amazing feat he has accomplished.

Welcome back

Welcome and welcome back new and returning students, along with our wonderful staff and faculty. You all make the School the great place it is today. Have a great year. See you soon. Happy Monday, Barbara