National Public Health Week It’s National Public Health Week, an initiative of the American Public Health Association. Thank you, public health workers everywhere, starting with our own Orange and Durham county health departments and including all the other county and regional departments in N.C. Thanks for what you do to keep us healthy, to intervene...
Ann Millikan’s symphony Friday night, the Chapel Hill Philharmonia played the Millikan Symphony for the first time. It was held at Hill Hall, one of many buildings I’d never been to on the UNC campus and a very intimate, special place. Ann Millikan, the composer of the symphony, is an amazing woman who was very...
For my blog post this week, I draw readers’ attention to a brilliantly written, heartfelt and, I believe, accurate statement about recent events in this state, written by Jack Boger, dean of the UNC School of Law, and published Feb. 18 on the school’s web site. Dean Boger is a responsible, thoughtful and highly rigorous...
A remarkable legacy It is not just about the basketball triumphs—although having coached some of the greatest teams in basketball is an amazing feat. I’ll leave that aspect for others to eulogize. It’s the man Dean Smith whom I admired. Few of us here today lived in the Chapel Hill of 1958 when it was...
Students, faculty and staff members, and community leaders grapple with structural racism On Saturday, I had the kind of powerful, in-the-moment experience that makes me so grateful to be a dean at Carolina. Early last year, Deborah Stroman, PhD, CLU, a Frank Hawkins Kenan Institute of Private Enterprisefaculty member I admire greatly, asked if we...
Change–happening faster, with shorter intervals Web cycles: The first time I led the redesign of an organizational website, the process seemed monumental. At the end, we breathed a sigh of relief and thought it would be quite a while before we made any more changes. That interval was shorter than we all expected. Recently, when...
Last week, violence struck one of our UNC faculty members in a beautiful neighborhood adjoining our School and the campus. We’re part of that neighborhood – some of our faculty live there; one of them is president of the community association; and many people walk through the quiet residential area, to enjoy its peaceful, tree-lined streets, bountiful flowers and lovely homes.
North Carolina is the second largest hog producer in the U.S., right behind Iowa. There are more than 10 million hogs in the state, and every day, they produce 40 million gallons of waste.This waste is stored in massive open-air swine lagoons. The lagoons range from four to 14 feet deep and are lined with...
Sunday, I was struck by the complementarity of messages in articles that appeared in the New York Times about South Africa and in a local Herald Sun opinion piece authored by Jonathan Kotch, MD, MPH, one of our faculty members. In South Africa and in North Carolina, there are huge gaps in social and health...
Anyone interested in advancing collaborative science should read the article, Atypical Combinations and Scientific Impact, in the Oct. 25 issue of Science magazine. Dr. Brian Uzzi, distinguished professor at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management and colleagues report on their analysis of 17.9 million research papers. They set out to understand how novelty and conventionality in...
Work as a privilege I’m sorry to be late in writing this week. My 36 hours traveling to Japan for 1.5 days there took a toll. I really admire my colleagues who seem to be able to travel around the world effortlessly. A colleague from the School and I were talking about what a privilege...