The University of California Board of Regents approved the promotion of UCI’s Program in Public Health to an official school, the Joe C. Wen School of Population and Public Health, on July 18.
The transition was made possible with a donation of $50 million by businessman Joe C. Wen and his family. $42.5 million of the pledge will support the new school, and the rest will support cardiovascular research in the School of Medicine, according to UCI News.
The new school is the fourth UC public health school to be established and the first school of public health in Orange County. Founding Dean Dr. Bernadette Boden-Albala expressed how the school’s promotion from program status will open new avenues of research.
“Wen Public Health will focus on research and instruction using transformative public health science to optimize health and well-being in culturally diverse communities in Southern California,” Boden-Albala told New University.
The new school was years in the making, according to Dr. Scott Bartell, Associate Dean of Academic Affairs and professor of environmental and population health.
“For at least 20 years or so, this has been an idea of something we wanted to do as a campus, so it’s really exciting for me to finally see it come to full fruition,” Bartell said.
UCI first began offering Public Health Sciences and Public Health Policy as undergraduate degrees in 2003. In 2012, the Public Health program was accredited by the Council on Education for Public Health, and in recent years it has expanded to include four departments and additional undergraduate minors, master’s and Ph.D. programs.
Global Health Ph.D. student Maia Tarnas hopes the new school will create additional opportunities for applied learning.
“With the increase in resources and the support of a school behind them, students will hopefully be increasingly involved with training opportunities in research and outside of the classroom,” Tarnas told New University.
Tarnas also hopes the school will see the expansion of the Global Health program.
“We’re increasingly seeing the inequitable effects of climate change, conflict, forced displacement and other complex phenomena on health outcomes globally, and these issues deserve our dedicated attention,” Tarnas said.
Following the school’s approval, administrators are to develop plans for the expansion of current programs and the creation of new ones. One potential program in the works is a combined five-year undergraduate and master’s of public health program, but getting such a program approved will have its challenges, according to Bartell.
“UCI doesn’t really like those programs. Our academic senate is skeptical of them,” Bartell said, referring to program guidelines establishing minimum unit requirements and limitations on how many courses may overlap between two degrees.
Other facets of established degrees have recently seen growth in their offered concentrations. This year, concentrations in Global Health and in Health Systems and Policy were added to the master’s program, and a concentration in Biobehavioral Mechanisms of Health was added to the Ph.D. program.
According to faculty, the pandemic played a role in cementing the necessity of public health and the expansion of UCI’s public health program within the last five years.
“People were learning for the first time what public health was and how important it is to have a public health school and faculty embedded in the community working with the local health organizations,” Annie Ro, associate professor of public health said.
Mariam Farag is a News Intern for the summer 2024 quarter. She can be reached at msfarag@uci.edu.
Edited by Jaheem Conley and Jacob Ramos.