The State of the School 2025

Jared Perkins, a guest speaker and director of health policy strategy at the school’s Center for Advancing Health Policy through Research (CAHPR), cited a survey showing that 99% of Congressional staff wanted access to high-quality, evidence-based research. He and his team at CAHPR are actively presenting findings from critical studies to lawmakers in Washington D.C. and at the Rhode Island State House to help them craft legislation that improves public health.  

Other guest speakers included:

• Brandon Marshall, Royce Family Professor of Teaching Excellence in Epidemiology and professor of epidemiology, renowned for his work in opioid overdose prevention and harm reduction, who emphasized the impact of teaching and the importance of using all available resources to move beyond a lecture-based model toward a more collaborative classroom.
• Sean MacLean, an alumnus of Brown’s Online MPH program and a community disaster specialist with the Greater New York Region Red Cross, described how the program enabled him to continue his studies at Brown while working in disaster zones in North Carolina and Hawaii, applying classroom learning directly to his fieldwork.
• Rebecca Hubbard, the Carl Kawaja and Wendy Holcombe Professor of Public Health and professor of biostatistics and data science, detailed how biostatistical methods she practices at Brown are addressing biases inherent in randomized controlled trials. She also discussed how she and her students are processing large clinical-care datasets to draw findings from real-world settings.
• Erin Fuse Brown, a lawyer, legal scholar and professor of health services, policy and practice, described her work at Brown producing high-quality policy research that thoroughly defines issues, identifying legal and policy levers, and then delivering findings to policymakers who can act on them.

Unprecedented times

Jha noted that last spring many of the school’s faculty received notices that their research was deemed “antithetical to the scientific inquiry.” Students saw public health agencies, the very places where they envisioned making a difference during their professional careers, haphazardly gutted. Many alumni, who work at or with those agencies, witnessed life-saving programs abruptly terminated. The school’s community partners have had to scramble to maintain and justify their programs, even as they continue to serve the most vulnerable. School of Public Health staff have had to pivot, multiple times, in order to manage immediate and potential threats to the school’s finances, operations, research endeavors, education programs, diversity and inclusion initiatives and communications.

“We truly are in unprecedented times,” Jha said. “In my lifetime I cannot think of another time where questions like what is the basic truth, what are facts, are being questioned. Expertise is being undermined.” 

And yet, despite the pressures of this moment, the school is training more students, having greater research impact, and shaping more policy than at any other time in its history, Jha said.

“Across the nation, schools of public health are asking what is our purpose and why do we do what we do? How do we make sure what we do matters?” Jha said. “We have an answer to that question: We do what we do because we know that through generating knowledge, through translating and sharing that knowledge, and through training leaders who are equipped with that knowledge, we improve the health of people here and around the world.”