On Tuesday, beneath a crowded tent on the Ruth J. Simmons Quadrangle, students, faculty, staff and alumni of the Brown University School of Public Health gathered together with University leadership to hear the annual State of the School address from the dean. This year, Dean Francesca Beaudoin used the opportunity to focus on expanding the school’s research impact, strengthening public health education and deepening community partnerships.
Drawing on her background as an emergency physician and epidemiologist, Beaudoin reflected on her 20-year journey at Brown. It was clinical experiences in the emergency room during the early years of the opioid crisis that initially led her to experts at the School of Public Health, before she went on to enroll as a doctoral student.
“Whenever I connected with someone at this school, our school, I always heard the same response: How can we work together to solve this problem?” Beaudoin said. “That type of ethos made clear to me that I had found my professional home.”
“Today, we are a community of more than 1,300 individuals, making us quite a large school of public health,” Beaudoin said, pointing to a detailed breakdown of the school's expanding footprint — 166 core faculty members; over 400 staff, postdocs and adjunct faculty; and nearly 800 students. Among the student body, she shared, more than 600 are graduate students pursuing 11 degree programs, including 401 MPH students, 104 doctoral students and 147 master of science students.
Another 129 Brown undergraduates are concentrating in public health or statistics, she shared, making public health the seventh largest concentration at Brown University.
