Protecting, Connecting, Thriving
The launch of our spring issue coincides with this year’s National Public Health Week. While this annual awareness event lasts just a few days during the first week of April, the values articulated in this year’s theme, “protecting, connecting, and thriving,” are interwoven in all the research, learning, and teaching we do at the Rollins School of Public Health all year long. Our shared concern for protecting and advancing the health and wellbeing of others—including each other—serves as a connector for the staff, faculty, and students that work and learn alongside us, and our generous donors who continue to support our mission.
Our alignment with this theme is also exemplified in the stories you will find in this issue of Rollins magazine. Our cover story, “Food for Thought,” centers on food and the various factors affecting people’s access to safe, healthy, nutritious sustenance, as well as the research led by Rollins faculty aiming to improve health equity, prevent foodborne diseases, and promote nutrition. We also dive into the growing global challenge of antimicrobial resistance in “Have We Entered a Post-Antibiotic Age?” which discusses ways to mitigate infectious disease spread, including long-term solutions, like investing in clean water and sanitation in low-resource settings. Environmental justice is a connecting theme across our areas of work at Rollins. The community engagement our researchers have fostered in Brunswick, Georgia, serves as just one example of the ways we create meaningful connections to advance health, improve lives, and both inform and promote public health research. You can learn about that work in “The Burden of Brunswick.”
Thinking of our own community, I am thrilled to welcome the newest leader to Rollins this June, when Dr. Stephen W. Patrick will join us as chair of the Department of Health Policy and Management. I hope you’ll take the time to learn about him and his background in “Bridging Patient Care, Polling, and Policy.”
As I write this in late March, it has been six months since our strategic plan officially launched. In this short amount of time, we have made concrete steps toward advancing all six of our plan’s goals: make discoveries that make a difference; transform our offerings; put research to work; build a thriving workplace; integrate diversity, equity, and inclusion; and champion public health. I invite you to read about our progress so far, and the specific work we have done in each of these areas on our strategic plan website, which will be updated in mid-April.
Outside of our efforts to improve our school and the public’s health more broadly, we are connected by our concern for humanity. We are living in a time of uncertainty, with 2024’s contentious presidential election looming large over the year ahead, and important public health issues at stake. Armed conflict and humanitarian crises continue to rage in regions around the world—including Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan, Libya, Syria, Yemen, and more. Staying focused on why we do what we do can sometimes feel impossible. But, that is why our school exists. We promote health and prevent disease and injury. We care and activate, even when it feels impossible to know where to begin. The need to protect, connect, and do the work necessary to help others thrive is more important now than ever before. So, let us keep doing what we do best. Good work.
M. Daniele Fallin, PhD
James W. Curran Dean of Public Health
Rollins School of Public Health
Emory University
