This is a school accustomed to moving in giant steps.
Four and a half years after it was created in the fall of 1990, the school has more than doubled its faculty and course offerings, tripled its students in both the Master of Public Health degree and Ph.D. degree programs, and become the second-ranked school at Emory in terms of research funding.
*Today, there are 503 students enrolled in the master of public health program, more than triple the original 163. Approximately half attend classes while working, often as physicians, nurses, public health practitioners, and other healthcare professionals. Others complement classroom instruction with experience through practice. Half of applicants and half of accepted students are from the South. Eighty are Emory employees on courtesy scholarships. The school now boasts 765 alumni.
*The school granted its first doctoral degree in epidemiology in 1993; today there are 43 students enrolled in the Ph.D. programs in epidemiology and in biostatistics.
*The school now has 85 faculty members, reflecting rapid growth from the original 33.
*Beginning with a strong research faculty, the school last year reached $11,303,025, second only to the medical school in total dollars. Principal research areas include cancer risk and occurrence, AIDS prevention, treatment effectiveness, nutrition, infectious disease models, violence prevention, minority health, occupational injuries and reproductive health.
The Rollins School of Public Health has become one of the most interdisciplinary of Emory's schools. One in three faculty members hold joint appointments, and the MPH can be obtained in conjunction with the MD degree, the master of nursing and the MBA, with planning underway for joint degree programs with law, theology and the Soviet, Post-Soviet and East European Studies program.
Several research entities also bridge public health with other parts of campus (as well as the world). The Center for Injury Control joins public health and emergency medicine. The Center for Health, Society and Culture joins public health, medicine, nursing, Emory College and the Carter Center. The Center for Cli-nical Evalu-ation Sciences joins public health, medicine, nursing, the hospitals, and The Emory Clinic. The school is a lead participant in planning for the Seretean Center for Health Promotion and will operate the health education center.
The adjunct faculty, doubled from the original 100 to 221 members, reflect ever-growing partnerships with the nation's leading public health agencies. Collaborations with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), The Carter Center, American Cancer Society, and state and local agencies all further the school's mission of acquiring, disseminating and applying knowledge to promote health and prevent disease in human populations.
One of the most international of Emory's schools, public health draws students from across the world. More than 12 percent of MPH students are international, and many others come to short courses designed especially to meet the needs of international public health professionals. One of the earliest and strongest measures of the new school's recognition was its selection in 1993 as one of two universities designated as a Hubert H. Humphrey Fellowship health campus. Last year the first group of 11 fellows came to the school from countries as diverse as Ghana, Macedonia, Egypt, Indonesia and Argentina. Another early measure of success was the Program Against Micronutr-ient Malnutrition, which continues to provide a model for international collaborative research and training and has been instrumental in preventing the devastating effects of nutritional deficiencies in children in developing nations. Individual faculty also conduct research programs in countries throughout the world.
Although the Rollins School of Public Health is new, public health at Emory goes back two decades. The first public health degree program was put together in the mid-1970s by Emory medical faculty and the director of the CDC, who mobilized other public health resources in the city to form a consortium. The Master of Public Health degree (MPH) program was offered originally in the School of Medicine's community health department.
In 1989 the program was made a division of the Woodruff Health Sciences Center. The following year, it became Georgia's only school of public health and one of only 27 in the nation and one of eight in private universities. Raymond Greenberg, the school's first and only dean, had been chair of the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics in the School of Medicine. The medical school also gave over its departments of biostatistics and epidemiology to assure its new sister school had all of the core public health disciplines. Full accreditation of the new school was obtained within two years.
Following these recent years of exponential growth, public health has entered a new phase of consolidation and stability, according to Greenberg. Last year, its major constraint was space to house its expanding programs. The support of the Rollins family and the move into the Grace Crum Rollins Public Health Building are great steps forward.
As the school moves toward its fifth anniversary this fall, applications for enrollment continue to pour in, increasing by about 30 percent per year, even without extensive marketing. Faculty proposals for research continue to rise. A search has begun for a new dean, following Greenberg's resignation to become vice president for academic affairs and provost of the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston.
No one ever expected the Rollins School of Public Health to stand still, of course.
--Sylvia Wrobel