A search committee to identify the next dean for the
School of Public
Health has been appointed by President William R. Brody
and convened by Provost Steven Knapp, who is serving as its
chairman.
The committee anticipates identifying a candidate in
time for him or her to be in place for the start of the
2005-2006 academic year.
Alfred Sommer, dean of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg
School of Public Health for 14 years, announced in early
May that he will step down in September 2005 to return to
research and teaching.
"This is a great school that has made tremendous
advances under the leadership of Dean Sommer," Knapp said.
"While his will be a very hard act to follow, our job is to
recommend to President Brody a small number of people who
can build on Al Sommer's considerable success. We are
looking for people who combine a clear vision for the
future of public health, both globally and locally, with a
collaborative style that will enable them to lead a highly
talented and self-motivated faculty. A tall order, but we
know there are people both here at Johns Hopkins and
elsewhere who are up to this challenge and who will be
attracted by the opportunity to lead the nation's foremost
school of public health."
Among his many accomplishments, Sommer has forged
strong partnerships with all other JHU divisions, which
include an effort with the School of Medicine to devise a
national model for training clinical researchers, and
combined degree programs with both the School of Nursing
and the School of Professional Studies in Business and
Education. Sommer, a 1973 graduate of the School of Public
Health, also led the school throughout its recently
completed, massive 12-year effort to expand, renovate and
modernize its 78-year-old campus.
To date, a position posting has been drafted and sent
to several venues. Knapp said that the committee will begin
meeting this month to discuss what specific qualifications
it will be seeking and also to discuss the question of
whether to engage internal and/or external consultants in
helping the committee sharpen its focus.
Nominations are currently being solicited from
faculty, staff and students. Recommendations should be
brought to Knapp's attention by e-mail sent to
provost@jhu.edu.
"Nominations by committee members and others are
typically our most important sources of candidates,
although we also advertise for good measure," Knapp said.
"The role of the committee is first to cast as wide a net
as possible, then to select a group of perhaps a dozen
candidates to invite to campus for formal interviews, then
to gather as much information as it can from each
candidate's home institution and other relevant sources and
finally to produce a list of three to five finalists to
recommend to the president, who makes the final selection,
subject to approval by the board of trustees."
Members of the search committee from the School of
Public Health are Robert Black, chair of International
Health; Patrick Breysse, professor; Josef Coresh, associate
professor; Diane Griffin, chair of Molecular Microbiology
and Immunology; Thomas LaVeist, professor; Ellen MacKenzie,
professor; Cecile Pickart, professor; George Rebok,
professor; Amy Tsui, professor; and Scott Zeger, chair of
Biostatistics.
Other committee members are Knapp; Martha Hill, dean
of the School of Nursing; Edward Miller, dean of the School
of Medicine and CEO of Johns Hopkins Medicine; Robert
Moffitt, professor of economics in the School of Arts and
Sciences; and Edgar Roulhac, vice provost for academic
services. Two Public Health students, still to be
identified, will also serve on the search committee.
Knapp said that the new dean would lead the Bloomberg
School in an era of global change and great opportunity.
"We live in a time in which the rapid movement of
people and goods around the world can quickly lead to
unforeseen epidemics. But this is also an era in which
population-based health sciences are coming into their own
and are providing unprecedented opportunities both to
detect and prevent the spread of disease and to address
those conditions that give rise to them in the first
place," he said. "Finally, this is an era in which
collaboration across disciplines is enhancing our
understanding of problems that in the past we scarcely
recognized, let alone understood. With its international
scope and its access to state-of-the-art resources in
medicine, nursing, engineering and the social sciences,
there is no question that the Bloomberg School is uniquely
positioned to address some of the most pressing issues of
our generation."
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