Looking back a year from the fall 2021 issue of Advances, I see the country taking meaningful steps to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic and to remake itself as it continues to face up to its inherent racism. These efforts are ongoing and essential. COVID-19 is still killing around 350 Americans every day and we in public health can’t lag in our work to get every person vaccinated and boosted. As individuals and as a school, we must hold firm in our determination to act in the name of antiracism.
I’m the interim dean of the School of Public Health (SPH), having stepped up on February 1 as John Finnegan Jr. stepped down after 42 years of service, a journey that took him from SPH staff member to dean (see page 33). When we publish this magazine again in 2023, there will be, most likely, a new permanent dean for this great school and I will be proud to have shepherded it into their hands. In this issue of Advances are some of the reasons why.
Aging has long been seen in the public health world as a vehicle for amassing chronic diseases and developing dementia, but there’s also a richer side to it and that’s what we explore in our cover story (page 16). Our Center for Healthy Aging and Innovation continues our school’s long scholarship on aging with a new perspective — the “innovation” in its name — seeing it through a community-based, health equity lens to give every person the chance for a dignified and satisfying quality of life and care in their old age.
Our school has been a groundbreaker when it comes to cardiovascular disease (CVD) research, especially Ancel Keys’ Seven Countries Study that linked CVD with how we live and eat. But our early CVD studies, like most in the U.S., left out people who weren’t white and male, resulting in treatments and protocols that were insufficient, at best, for many millions of people (see “algorithmic fairness” on page 4). Our ongoing MESA (Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis) study began 20 years ago (page 10) to counter this trend — roughly 38 percent of the recruited participants are white, 28 percent are African-American, 22 percent are Hispanic, and 12 percent are Asian. More than 2,000 papers have used MESA findings to highlight crucial concepts, such as persistent racial and ethnic differences in CVD deaths and illness and, recently, the impacts of air pollution on heart health.
As you read through this issue, you’ll find that health equity and antiracism guide us as we strive to make health a human right. They are woven through our work, from our research on the diseases of poverty (page 12) to our applied practice student experiences (page 22) to our work with high schoolers at risk (page 26). Public health has changed and it is growing into and claiming its mission as a field devoted to and working toward justice. What an exciting and incredibly important time for all of us in public health!
I hope you enjoy this issue of Advances.
Timothy Beebe, PhD
Interim Dean and Professor
