Over each weekend, I would reflect on the prior week and write a post for Monday Morning. The blog reflected issues of the day, sometimes related primarily to our school, but more often on topics with broader relevance and resonance. While I did not always achieve my goal of posting weekly, I published 524 posts, including this, my final post. The table below shows the topics about which I wrote. I am grateful to Lisa Warren, who has been a steadfast editor, fact finder, fact-checker, and authentic voice for viewing issues from multiple perspectives, and to Linda Kastleman, before Lisa, for th ..read more

In his recent statement marking Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, And Intersex (LGBTQI+) Pride Month 2022, President Biden said: Today, the rights of LGBTQI+ Americans are under relentless attack. Members of the LGBTQI+ community — especially people of color and trans people — continue to face discrimination and cruel, persistent efforts to undermine their human rights. An onslaught of dangerous anti-LGBTQI+ legislation has been introduced and passed in States across the country, targeting transgender children and their parents and interfering with their access to health care. These ..read more

I still remember when an Epidemiology faculty member alerted me in January 2020 to a novel coronavirus with pandemic potential circulating in China that probably would reach the U.S. We were concerned, but at the time, we did not imagine we would have lost 1 million people in America to that virus by May 2022. Still, a 2018 symposium we hosted on the 1918 flu pandemic, called “Going Viral,” gave me a chilling sense of what could happen. By October 2021, more than 140,000 children in the U.S. had lost a parent or caregiver to COVID-19, according to a May 13, 2022, article in the CDC’s “Cov ..read more

I’ve led 15 Gillings in-person commencements and been in the platform party for 30 UNC-Chapel Hill commencements (spring and winter), subtracting the virtual commencements necessitated by the pandemic. Wow! (I never added it up!) I’ve never sent a substitute to the latter. That’s a lot of commencements. And I loved every one of the in-person commencements. (Let’s forget the virtual ones! It’s no way to hold a commencement, but we learned.) I loved them even more as I spent more time as dean. This is coming from a person who skipped two out of three of her own commencements. I love commencement ..read more

Our plan is not a liberal plan nor a conservative plan, Democratic nor Republican plan. We welcome all points of view in the Gillings School. Over the years, we have invited people with diverse perspectives to speak. We do not inhibit anyone’s freedom of expression. Our IEAP is solidly a public health plan to overcome inequities in health and health care in North Carolina, the U.S. and around the world, in keeping with our school’s mission. After decades of rigorous study and volumes of data, we know that many health and health care inequities have their roots in structural racism. We will not ..read more

Photo by John Ra, Partners in Health The Boston Globe reported that colleagues at Harvard said Farmer had been working and teaching at Rwanda’s University of Global Health Equity, which he co-founded. I cannot believe Dr. Farmer is gone. He had such an amazing global presence. Dr. Suzanne Maman, professor and associate dean for global health at the Gillings School, recounted that many of their masters’ program applicants said they were motivated by Farmer. I read Mountains Beyond Mountains, by Tracy Kidder. Farmer, the subject of the book, became one of my heroes for his work in some of the ..read more

I’d recently read the 1975 biography of the brilliant chemist and X-ray crystallographer, Dr. Rosalind Franklin (1920–1958), by Anne Sayre. I have been captivated by Franklin’s extraordinary work, the tragedy of a life cut brutally short by cancer, her experience of antisemitism from scientists who believed dogma about Jewish people, and the misogyny and dishonesty with which she was treated in what was unapologetically a man’s world. Like Franklin, early in my career, I often was the only woman in a meeting, and I still recall some of the belittling comments that were made toward me. Markel ..read more

In April 1968, when Dr. King was assassinated, I was a college student living with my then-boyfriend’s family in the Detroit suburbs before departing for a waitressing job in Wisconsin. The night Dr. King was murdered, and for several nights after, we could see the smoke rising up from multiple places in the city as it burned. The scene was repeated in scores of cities across the United States. Anger burned and simmered everywhere, and everything was on the line that spring and summer. In an article published Jan. 17 in The New Yorker, Jelani Cobb wrote, This holiday honoring Martin Luther Kin ..read more

I am grateful that, at the Gillings School, we can call on epidemiologists, infectious disease experts, behavioral scientists and others to advise on decisions we make regarding the pandemic. Our decisions are grounded in data and science. We pay attention to what other schools at UNC-Chapel Hill and beyond are doing and to university policies. On Jan. 7, our school’s senior leadership, including our Chairs’ Committee, in consultation with students, Gillings and university researchers, modelers and public health experts, made the decision to start the spring 2022 semester remotely, for three w ..read more

IN BRIEF: Today, I am writing about the importance of thinking about public health in terms of well-being, which includes physical, mental, spiritual health and the opportunity for every person to thrive. Focusing on well-being would enable us to consider how to build more effective and meaningful workplaces, including schools of public health. The inspiration for this post is a conversation between Vivek Murthy, MD, U.S. Surgeon General; Krista Tippett, host of On Being; and Richard Davidson, MD, the William James and Vilas Research Professor of Psychiatry and Psychology, and founder and dire ..read more