ST. LOUIS — Washington University is launching a new school devoted to public health and has hired a Boston University epidemiologist to lead the charge.
The new school will be WashU’s first in almost a century, and will study a subject that has lived at the center of national debate for much of the past four years. It is slated to launch in the fall of 2026.
In a recent conversation, Dr. Sandro Galea said he began his career as a practicing doctor, motivated, like many health care workers, by a desire to help people. But during a stint with Doctors Without Borders in Somalia, serving as the only physician in a region of about 350,000 people, he began to reevaluate.
“I was struck by the observation that what I was doing, when I was dealing with a cholera outbreak, when I was dealing with people who were injured from violence, that once I left ... nothing was really going to change. And I started thinking, there must be a different way,” Galea said. “I went into medicine because I want to keep people healthy, not just to treat people when they are sick.”
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Despite working as a physician and holding a degree from a prestigious medical school, he said he’d had very little exposure to the ideas of public health. But in the years that followed, it became his main focus.
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Dr. Sandro Galea, future dean of the Washington University School of Public Health. Courtesy photo taken by Kelly Davidson.
The COVID-19 pandemic, Galea said, brought much greater awareness of the importance of public health. It’s better understood today by decision-makers and the general population. Public health, as a whole, has struggled with cyclical investment, rising during periods of crisis and then dropping off, which left health agencies ill-equipped when the virus hit in early 2020.
“I worry,” Galea said, “that that has not been matched by commensurate investment, and sustained investment. And I think it is going to take a tremendous amount of effort and energy on the part of everybody in public health to make sure that we sustain interest in public health, even when we don’t have a crisis. And I think this is where Washington University, having a School of Public Health, can be part of the conversation.”
Galea has become known as a vocal proponent of the notion that health is shaped not just by medical advancements, but by social, political and economic forces. It’s a case he made again in his 2021 book, “The Contagion Next Time,” which explores the public health context of COVID-19, and how it informs pandemic preparedness going forward.
“Whether we get sick in the first place depends largely on our quality of life and the forces that shape it,” Galea wrote. “The influence of these forces is like air — easy to overlook precisely because it is so ubiquitous.”
Galea was born and raised in Malta, and his family immigrated to Canada when he was a teenager. He attended medical school at the University of Toronto and began practicing in northern Canada, and then around the world in the Philippines, Papua New Guinea and Somalia.
In 2000 he moved to the U.S. to pursue a master’s degree in public health. He went on to earn a Doctor of Public Health from Columbia University, a school he selected in part for its strengths in mental health epidemiology.
WashU also announced Monday that it has hired Dr. Margaret Kruk, professor of health systems at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. She will serve as a professor of health systems and medicine. Kruk is married to Galea.
Galea will begin in the WashU role on Jan. 1.
In the coming years, the School of Public Health will look to attract faculty and students, and bring the school into the national and global conversation at a time when trust in science and public health has been challenged.
During a recent talk at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a D.C. think tank, Galea questioned how the past few years should inform curriculum around public health communication.
“I’m not sure that anyone has quite shown me where we should go,” Galea said.
The university has an important opportunity to be part of the global and local discourse around public health, he told the Post-Dispatch.
“I think there is no more important conversation, for our collective well-being,” he said. “I’m delighted that Washington University is engaging in public health in a serious way, and I’m honored to be a small part of it.”
View life in St. Louis through the Post-Dispatch photographers' lenses. Edited by Jenna Jones.