Dean's Update
November 15, 2024 - Aron Sousa, MD
Friends,
This week, the college’s 60th Anniversary celebration moves to Flint. If’n you don’t know by now, our anniversary celebrations include a Town Hall on the history and current work of each campus. We will be celebrating Flint this week. Our work in Flint is so closely integrated with the community that Yvonne Lewis, one of our long-standing community collaborators, and Neal Hegarty, of the Mott Foundation, will join our panel. You can also check-up on Mona Hanna, MD (’02), MPH, Jennifer Johnson, PhD, Juan Jimenez, MS3, and Jennifer Edwards-Johnson, DO, who will also join our panel.
Friends of the update will know that our Flint expansion is curled up right next to my amygdala. I feel like I write about our work in Flint each week…for the uninitiated, however, the university has been in Flint for more than a century, the college has been in Flint educating medical students for 53 years, and this is the 10-year anniversary of our campus expansion focused on public health. That expansion included increasing medical students in the community from about 30 to about 50 per year, moving the Leadership in Medicine for the Underserved program to Flint, starting the Medical Partners in Public Health certificate, moving the MPH to Flint, and starting our public health unit in a new building in Flint. The plan was pretty audacious, but as audacious as it was, the success of our people has outstripped my expectations.
The funding for the college’s 2012-2014 expansion, our current faculty expansion, and the new space all came from the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation. It is worth noting these are endowments that will provide ongoing support. Of course, a decision to tax university endowments will threaten these funds as well as the support for many college and university programs made possible by our generous and civic-minded alumni and community partners.
Our Flint expansions were not just born from one person’s head or thigh. Our expansions follow on work supported by a Mott Foundation grant to Hurley Medical Center dating back to 2008. That grant brought hospital and higher education leaders together to look at the possibility of a medical school based in Flint. After several years of work, we landed on a model focused on public health.
Because Dean Marsha Rappley had her hip replaced shortly before the key Mott board meeting, President Simon and I were the ones to present our ideas to the board. To this day, that is the best presentation I have done. I talked about Jane Addams, founder of Hull House, and the settlement house concept as the model for our new public health unit. The settlement houses of the late 19th century placed academics within poor communities we would now call underserved. Settlement faculty did their scholarship in those communities and invited the community into the settlement houses. At Hull House, academics went out into the community to do their research and then invited the community into the house for classes and other programs.
Hull House physician scientist Alice Hamilton, MD, was one of the first people to study the community spread of typhoid, and she is seen as the founder of industrial hygiene because of her work on lead as an industrial toxin during her time at Hull House. While Dr. Hamilton did her research out in the community, inside of Hull House, she taught English to immigrant community members and ran well-baby programs. The Michigan State University-Hurley Children’s Hospital Pediatric Public Health Initiative, founded by our own Mona Hanna, MD MPH has created the Alice Hamilton Scholar program supporting young pediatric physician scholars in her honor.
At the time of the initial expansion, the college was fortunate to have Jeff Dwyer, PhD, as our senior associate dean for research and Jerry Kooiman as assistant dean for community and government relations. Jeff is a sociologist, now retired and raising grapes east of San Diego, with a long history of working with underserved populations. Jerry, who is still making the state better every day with his work for the college, was a state legislator and county commissioner back in the day. They brought special knowledge and dedication to our work with the people of Flint. They designed a process for community input into our focus and hiring in Flint.
Jerry put in a lot of shoe leather, and we soon had about 4,000 surveys, input from more than 80 community meetings, and a fully functional Flint Public Health Research Advisory Committee (FPHRC) about evenly split between university faculty and genuine community members. We asked the FPHRC for three areas of research focus for the hires of the new unit, now the Charles Stewart Mott Department of Public Health. The committee selected healthy behaviors, behavioral health, and chronic disease. And then they gave us a gift. In addition to those areas of focus, the committee asked that we focus on interventions to reduce health disparities.
And that extra instruction has been magical for us. The people of Flint do not want to be biopsied or have scientists parachute in to get data and leave. They want partners who will live and work with them. They want to work on interventions that will make their lives better and improve the lives of people everywhere. And they deserve to be treated as colleagues, be on the grants, be on the papers, and be paid for their expertise. The resulting Charles Stewart Mott Department of Public Health, the first academic department of any kind anywhere to be co-developed and co-led by community, has been wildly successful both in terms of traditional academic metrics and real-world impact. It is an example of how our work could and should be done.
The people of Flint are an important part of the college. They serve on search committees and help govern the department. They have worked with us to choose all our Flint-based faculty, including first research hire and founding chair, Jennifer Johnson. Together we really do focus in Flint on interventions and disparities projects that spread to communities across the state and the country. The work of these teams helps people in rural communities, suburbia, and cities. People of all races and backgrounds have benefited from programs to improve cancer screening and maternal mortality, prevent suicide, remove lead service lines everywhere, and eliminate child poverty in the first year of life. This community is truly remarkable. This work warms the soul and the amygdala.
Serving the people with you,
Aron
Aron Sousa, MD, FACP
Dean, Michigan State University College of Human Medicine