YSPH Celebrates Its Independence at First-Ever State of the School Address

Dr. Megan L. Ranney MD, MPH took to the stage to give the Yale School of Public Health’s first-ever state of the school address on October 17, 2024, as the first dean of the newly independent professional school. Ranney discussed the school’s history and its many “successes and statistics” from the past year. She also focused on the future, unveiling an ambitious and detailed strategic plan for YSPH for the next five years. The plan, Ranney said, charts a path forward “toward creating the field of public health that we all believe in for the 21st century.”

The school’s Alumni Association President Kathe Fox, PhD ’81, and Yale University Provost Scott A. Strobel welcomed Ranney. Strobel praised Ranney’s “endless energy and dedication to the faculty, students and staff, alumni, and community members.”

Strobel recalled the decision two years ago to make YSPH an independent school under the leadership of University President Emeritus Peter Salovey.

“Whether we’re talking about climate change, the COVID pandemic, cancer, or any of the other myriads of threats to our physical and mental well-being, we need public health policies and practices to guide solutions,” Strobel said.

“It’s a simple fact: Yale cannot be a world-leading university of the 21st century without excellent public health research, teaching, and practice,” he said. “To bolster this excellence, Yale must support a school of public health equal in standing to its other professional schools.”

In February 2022, the University pledged $150 million of endowment toward the Yale School of Public Health, which made it possible to take the first steps towards independence. The university also committed to improving the school’s space and is now in the process of planning a new building “that matches the excellence of our students, faculty, and staff,” Strobel said.

“Dollars and buildings are important, but they’re nothing if not directed by an ambitious leader with a clear-eyed strategic plan. And that’s where Dr. Megan Ranney comes in,” Strobel said, referring to Ranney as “a dean of the highest caliber.”

“Megan, thank you for making the Yale School of Public Health your home,” he said.

Linking Science and Society

Ranney came to Yale in July 2023 from Brown University where she served as deputy dean of the School of Public Health, believing “this was a moment of paradigm shift, for the field of public health, for higher education, but also for the globe as we move out of the COVID pandemic and get to chart our future together.”

Since her arrival, the school collectively developed a vision statement that “articulates the paradigm shift that we are looking forward to,” she said. The vision statement reads: “Linking science and society, making public health foundational to communities everywhere.”

“We thought it was incredibly important to signal that as a graduate and professional school, we are committed to not just conducting outstanding science, but also making sure that it gets out into the world. That’s what makes us different perhaps from some of our colleagues in other departments. And it’s core to why many of us have come to public health,” Ranney told the approximately 300 faculty, staff, students, and alumni who attended the historic event.

“I think it informs so much of what we are already doing and certainly helps light the way to the future,” she added. She began her address by talking about the school’s impact, emphasizing its world-class research, education, and community involvement.

Faculty Research

The school recently welcomed six ladder-track faculty, including Dr. Bhramar Mukherjee, PhD, the school’s first senior associate dean of public health data science and data equity. YSPH also welcomed 20 new research faculty.

In 2023, the school contributed 1,176 research publications, of which about 800 were from primary YSPH faculty. So far this year, the school has produced 905 publications.

Ranney also shared that, compared to peer schools from the Association of American Universities (AAU), YSPH faculty are ranked:

• 2nd in articles by faculty members
• 4th in overall research impact
• 4th in citations per faculty member

Students

Student enrollment has stabilized since the pandemic and is up 50% since 2020. While most of the country’s schools of public health have seen a decrease in the number of applicants, YSPH has seen a 20% increase in applications this year.

The current Master of Public Health class is the school’s most diverse since it began tracking diversity metrics among its classes, Ranney said. Of the current MPH students at YSPH:

• 41% are international students
• 25% are underrepresented minorities
• 18% are first-generation undergraduates
• 37% are first-generation graduate students
• The average age is 26
• 78 MPH students are enrolled in joint degree programs across the university
• YSPH provided $8.3 million in financial aid to students in the class of 2024-2025

Ranney also discussed the school’s Executive MPH Program and its MS and PhD programs.

A hybrid remote and in-person program, the Executive MPH program “represents a tremendous diversity of future public health leaders, with many folks coming from entirely outside of public health, others coming from policy, business, frontline health care workers, or other positions,” she said. “And again, they represent tremendous diversity and the future of what leadership in public health will look like. Many of them have experienced health challenges and/or the structural challenges that we know affect health themselves.”

Biostatistics and Health Informatics are the largest MS concentrations and 91% of MS students are inter-national. “Our PhD program is both one of the most selective in the country and has one of the highest yields of any public health PhD programs in the country,” Ranney said. Over the past five years, there have been 86 PhD graduates; 200 students have enrolled in the program.

Community Involvement

“Our community engagement knows no bounds,” Ranney said. The school’s Office of Public Health Practice has placed 234 students in internships, of which 40% were co-designed with the community and 14% were conducted in low- and middle-income countries. “Again, illustrating that global reach of our school,” she said.

“I can look at each of you and identify the organizations that I now know that you work with. That makes a difference,” she added. We’ve had over 450 volunteer hours served, not counting those research or educational partnerships, 11 community service events, and more than 81 meetings with community partners.”

The Strategic Plan

The 2025-2030 strategic plan “encapsulates the excitement and the vision of the community,” Ranney said. “Our mission is to educate and equip the best public health scientists, practitioners, and leaders to develop systems-level solutions for a healthier society.” Ranney continued, “Hopefully, all of you will feel that this strategic plan reflects your hopes and dreams for the future, not just for our school, not just for our field, but also for the globe.”

YSPH is committed to conducting outstanding science and making sure that its science gets out into the world. We “know that the discipline of public health—the ways in which we think about how we ask questions, how we gather data, how we develop interventions and prove that they work or don’t work, and then most of all, how we disseminate out—is foundational to a healthy community,” Ranney said.

“Our work is inherently about equity and about making sure that this skill set and the opportunity to live a healthy life is available to everyone regardless of what family they were born into, what country they were born into, or what historical injustices their community has suffered,” she added.

Six Strategic Priorities

“Our values have remained unchanged,” Ranney said. “We are committed to the values of innovation, leadership, justice, community, and of course, inclusion. And as I look around this room today, I know how much all of these matter to each of us,” she added.

“Our strategic priorities, however, are brand-new.”

The strategic plan’s six priorities are longer-term, organizational strategies “that we’re committed to putting in place to allow us to achieve and fulfill on that mission of educating and equipping the best scientists, practitioners, and leaders, but also to enable us to achieve that vision, that linkage of science to society,” she said. “These are the structural factors that we know need to be in place in order to fulfill what we see as our vision and mission.”

01. Create Pathways for Translating Outstanding Science into Local and Global Health Impact.

We will conduct world-class research and develop entrepreneurial frameworks that use our scholarship to tangibly improve societal well-being.

02. Educate Generations of Public Health Leaders.

We will ensure our students excel in understanding, conducting, and using rigorous science to advance population-level health.

03. Foster Interconnected, Inclusive, and Interdisciplinary Public Health Communities, Within and Beyond Yale.

We will invest in building resilient public health communities in our school, at Yale, in New Haven, Connecticut, and beyond.

04. Shape the Future of Public Health Data Science & Artificial Intelligence

We will meld ethics and equity with cutting-edge methods to shape how health-oriented data science is structured and used.

05. Enhance Trust in the Science and Practice of Public Health

We will support our students, faculty members, alumni, staff, and external partners in serving as trusted spokespeople for, and translators of, public health science.

06. Achieve Strategic Imperatives through Operational and Financial Excellence

We will strengthen the administrative and financial management systems that are fundamental to our ability to achieve our mission.

Scholarly Areas of Focus

1. How place, space, and climate impact health

“This is everything from the built environment to exposure to chemicals, to, of course, the effect of climate change on physical, emotional, and social well-being. We not just examine it and describe it, but we also develop interventions to help mitigate it,” Ranney said.

2. Reducing harm from intersecting epidemics

“We in public health know that no epidemic ever exists in isolation, whether it’s the topic that I spend most of my time working on, violence as a public health problem, whether it’s HIV, COVID, or obesity. We know that these epidemics are deeply intersecting and also often have common underlying root causes.”

3. Cost of and connection to the health ecosystem

“We’re committed to both illustrating the impact of the current Byzantine system in the U.S. and beyond. But also helping to make it simpler, helping to make it stronger, making sure that families as well as patients and healthcare providers can achieve their best outcomes for those who they love,” said Ranney, who is also an emergency physician.

4. The health implications of emerging technology

“This is one that I think is really fun and interesting because we have no idea what technologies are going to come next,” she said. “I think this is core to so much of the work that many of you do. But it’s also a big space for us to lean into.”