Dean's Message

The Future of Public Health
Major Threats
The Role of the School
Building for the Future
Allston

Faculty Profiles

Yuanli Liu
Heather Nelson
Stephen Buka
Barbara Burleigh
Eric Rimm
Karen Kuntz

Department &
Center Highlights

Annual Report Home

Credits

A fundamental issue in public health is how to hold countries of the world accountable for the health of their people. Measuring the health of populations requires metrics and analysis. For example, in most nations life expectancy has been increasing for many years, while in several countries in sub-Saharan Africa it has been falling. Increasingly, measuring achievements in public health now focuses on the quality of people's lives, not merely their duration. The landmark Global Burden of Disease study, led by Christopher Murray and colleagues at the Harvard School of Public Health, together with studies by Professor Milton Weinstein, has helped create metrics that encompass the burden of death, illness, and injury within the U.S., and in every nation. One metric known as the DALY (Disability-Adjusted Life Years) captures years lived in disability and chronic disease, as well as years of life lost through premature death. Though only approximations, metrics like these allow us to project trends that predict what the burden of disease might look like in 2020 globally, and within countries. They offer us at the School a framework for thinking hard about the present and future challenges to public health.

It has been said that there are three key criteria for successful institutional leadership: spending 30 percent of one's time thinking 10 years into the future; hiring people smarter than oneself; and just being lucky. I have been privileged to have enjoyed the latter two advantages in my career. Now, given proposed plans to relocate the School to a new campus at Allston within the decade, our entire faculty is deeply engaged in thinking about what public health will be in 10 to 20 years. To be prepared for the future, we must build upon analytic work of the past decade to enrich our understanding of changes in the global burden of disease and illness, and to come to a better comprehension of the relationship between health problems and societal problems, such as economic development and equity.
We at the Harvard School of Public Health are committed to allocating our greatest efforts and resources to areas in which we can have far-reaching impact. In these pages, we share our vision and highlight important discoveries and achievements in 2003 for each of our departments, divisions, and centers. We also introduce to you six of the many outstanding junior faculty members at the School who we believe represent tomorrow's leaders in the field.

NEXT: THE MAJOR THREATS

Barry R. Bloom
Dean of the Harvard School of Public Health

photo by Richard Friedman