Columbia Public Health Magazine

In her last year as dean, Linda P. Fried, MD, MPH, discusses public health past and future with alumna Perri Peltz, MPH ’84, DrPH ’23.

Dean Linda P. Fried, MD, MPH, has led Columbia Mailman School of Public Health to become one of the world’s top institutions for public health education and science. Through 16 years, thousands of students, and one global pandemic, her leadership has ensured that students go out into the world prepared to innovate and take charge to address society’s most persistent and urgent public health challenges. As she prepares to step down at the end of the 2024–2025 school year, Fried talks with alumna and Board of Advisors member Perri Peltz, MPH ’84, DrPH ’23 about what’s needed and what’s next for public health.

In the heart of New York City, the School offers community research and training experiences unlike any other.

By Dana Points 

Columbia Mailman School Already had a century-long history of developing research partnerships, facilitating student practica, and collaborating to improve public health in Northern Manhattan. Then COVID-19 hit. When the School’s leaders saw how longstanding health inequities fueled the pandemic’s devastating effect on the neighborhood, they knew they had to do more. And so, in 2021, under the guidance of Dean Linda P. Fried, MD, MPH, the School began to lay the groundwork for a Community Health Equity Collaborative (CHEC), launched in 2024, that would build new academic-community partnerships, accelerating efforts to decrease health inequities and improving the health of neighboring communities. Today, Columbia Mailman School is doing more than ever to reach out to those who live in the community and to its churches, nonprofit organizations, religious institutions, and advocacy groups. 

Faculty and students are working hard to communicate about public health in the most effective ways.

By Christina Hernandez Sherwood

There is no denying it: Today’s information landscape is punctuated by an increased mistrust of science, a partisan political climate, and a cacophony of social media voices. Public health experts must shout—strategically—in order to be heard. 

This has led to expanded interest in a skill that Columbia Mailman School has long emphasized: public health communication—that is, the act of conveying public health information not only to peers, but also to society at large. Public health professionals are realizing they need to change the way they think about this key skill. “Public health is largely invisible until there's a crisis. When the crisis recedes, the public health workforce fades into the background,” says Michael Sparer, JD, PhD, chair of Health Policy and Management. “We haven’t effectively communicated how public health makes life better for all of us, all of the time.”

Lead, arsenic, and other metals are all around us, with important health effects.

By Caroline Wilke

Present in the Earth’s crust since our planet formed, metals are everywhere. They occur in soils

and rocky ores. They circulate in the water we drink and the air we breathe. Our food—from vegetables to grains to fish—carries metals too. Our daily activities expose us to metals, in our surroundings and in commercial products. (A new study at the School even found metals in tampons.) “These are really important environmental exposures,” says Ana Navas-Acien, MD, PhD, MPH, Leon Hess Chair and Professor of Environmental Health Sciences. And with its myriad biological interactions, the metallome—the array of metals in our bodies—is crucial to human health. 

As the School’s Program on Forced Migration and Health has its 25th anniversary, the need for its leadership has never been greater.

By Jim Morrison

Columbia Mailman School has long worked to help communities faced with humanitarian crises. Today, with wars raging across the planet and millions of people displaced by economic upheaval and climate crisis, the School is rising to new challenges for global public health.

For Claire Greene, PhD, MPH, the memory of the group of Venezuelan people that she met in a migrant shelter in Colombia last Spring lingered long after she returned to Columbia Mailman School, where she is an assistant professor in the Heilbrunn Department of Population and Family Health. Eleven adults traveling with children had journeyed hundreds of miles from Venezuela to Peru, mostly on foot. They arrived with only a few bags of belongings. In Peru, one member fell ill but could not get care. So, like so many migrants today, they kept moving, backtracking to Colombia, which they had left a year earlier. They expected to gain access to emergency care there, because migrants had access to it, but they lacked legal status and getting it takes time and has barriers. 

With a new professorship and Child Health Center for Learning and Development, the School is doubling down on children’s health.

By Paula Derrow

Columbia Mailman School has a storied history of protecting the youngest and most vulnerable. Now, with the launch of the Child Health Center for Learning and Development, the stars are aligned to tackle this generation’s most daunting challenges. 

In the summer of 2023, Virginia Rauh, ScD, embarked on a listening tour, asking faculty at Columbia Mailman School, at the Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, and across the university about their work in the area of child and adolescent health. The purpose was to identify research and service-related gaps—community health needs that were not being adequately addressed.