The School of Public Health at Georgia State University will reorganize into departments, helping the school manage its rapid enrollment growth, and creating an organizational structure in line with other academic units at the university.
Two faculty members have been named as the inaugural department chairs:
Dr. Shannon Self-Brown
- Shannon Self-Brown will become the chair of the Department of Health Policy & Behavioral Sciences. Dr. Self-Brown is a professor, Director of the School’s PhD program and the Associate Director of the National SafeCare Training and Research Center (NSTRC). Her research interests include child maltreatment, family violence and urban health.
- Gerardo Chowell will be the chair of the Department of Population Health Sciences. Dr. Chowell is a professor of mathematical epidemiology who also holds an external affiliation as a Senior Research Fellow at the Division of International Epidemiology and Population Studies at the Fogarty International Center, National Institutes of Health.
Dr. Gerardo Chowell
Department chairs will serve a three-year term starting in August.
As part of the school’s reorganization, Daniel Whitaker is assuming a new role as Associate Dean for Research and Faculty Affairs. Dr. Whitaker is a professor and the Director of the NSTRC, which is housed in the Mark Chaffin Center for Healthy Development in the School of Public Health. His research interests focus on family violence including child maltreatment prevention and intimate partner violence prevention.
“These changes will help us become a more effective organization and allow us to continue to offer high-quality instruction and other services for students while we strive for excellence in research and scholarship,” said Dr. Michael Eriksen, Dean of the school.
Dr. Daniel Whitaker
The school, which began in 2004 as a program with one faculty member and a handful of students, has seen strong growth in enrollment in its public health degree programs. It now has nearly 50 faculty members, more than 700 alumni, and could reach an enrollment of 700 students before the end of the 2018-2019 academic year.
The school offers academic programs ranging from a B.S. in public health to the doctoral level, including a new Doctor of Public Health (DrPH) program that will start in the fall of 2018.