Welcome to The Dean's Office

Dean's Message - Winter 2011-12

It’s commencement season here at the University of South Florida and we revel in the joy that this season brings - we share in the exuberance over goals accomplished and in the nervous excitement for what is to come. We celebrated our third group of undergraduates earning a Bachelor of Science in Public Health and our largest ever class of MPH graduates from our public health practice program. We awarded three PhD’s this December and a healthy crop of MPH, MSPH and MHA degrees. We met parents and partners, spouses and significant others and a great group of babies and toddlers! It really does take a village . . .

Speaking of The Villages, our historic partnership, USF Health in The Villages is thriving. A team of outstanding faculty from across the College and the Florida Mental Health Institute at our sister College of Behavioral and Community Science are guiding a stellar team of 18 graduate assistants in a comprehensive formative assessment of the health status, health concerns and health desires of the 84,000 older adult residents of The Villages. We are putting the finishing touches on a survey instrument that will go out in February and our incredible staff are continuing to build strong relationships with the community by offering educational programming around health issues, training on how to safely surf the internet, Wellness Wednesday’s and Memory Screening Mondays. It is a remarkable example of the power of a true partnership between an academic health center and an interested community.

We are getting ready to welcome our spring 2012 cohort into an ever-vibrant College. We recently welcomed our newest Department Chair, Dr. William Sappenfield, Chair of the Department of Community and Family Health and Director of the Lawton and Rhea Chiles Center who comes to us from the Florida Department of Health. Soon to be joining him in the Chiles Center is Dr. Robert Nelson, the newly appointed Associate Vice President for Child Health, formerly chair of the USF Health Department of Pediatrics. And because we consistently surprise even ourselves, we just added to our faculty complement, Dr. Kate Wright-Quintero, an expert in second language acquisition and communication, who is launching an aggressive program to improve the writing skills of our students and our faculty while also assisting the growing population of students who come to us from other countries, where English is not their first language.

We remain extremely grateful that we are part of USF Health and are very excited about Carl and Frank Morsani’s $20 million gift to build a new medical college! We have enjoyed getting to know the first 54 students in our brand new Doctor of Pharmacy program, which is unique in its emphasis on public health approaches to pharmaceutical therapeutic issues. We are writing grant proposals with our College of Nursing and our School of Physical Therapy and Rehabilitation Science around innovative models of inter-professional education. And we are partnering with a creative group of medical students in operating a free-clinic on campus, serving the indigent community of East Tampa.

We are gearing up for study abroad programs in Malaysia and India and are building a truly global approach to alternative health therapies including the practices of different communities in Asia, Africa and the Americas. We are finalizing the plans for a third conference on Water and Security in the Middle East with such novel partners as the US Central Command and Coca Cola. And our very popular “bus tour” course keeps our undergraduates enthralled with how complex the public health system is in our community (and how difficult it is to get around using public transportation!).

As always, we invite you to come see for yourself just how special this College us and we hope you will join us in our efforts to promote and protect the public’s health through our scholarship, learning and outreach efforts. Come inside and see why public health really is your health and your chance to change the world.