Chats with the Chairs: Peter Cunningham, Department of Health Policy
The School of Public Health department chairs share their perspectives about the mission, focus and future of each department.
By Hannah Wente
VCU’s School of Public Health brings together the departments of Biostatistics, Epidemiology, Health Policy and Social and Behavioral Sciences, each with its own mission, but with a unified focus on public health. After our first full year as VCU’s newest school, we sat down with each of the chairs for a closer look at what’s going on in each department.
Next in this series of Q&As is Peter Cunningham, Ph.D., professor and interim chair of the Department of Health Policy. To read our conversations with the other chairs, click here.
How does the Department of Health Policy fit into VCU’s School of Public Health?
The department brings our knowledge of all the different varieties and complexities of health policy at a federal, state and local level, and then we’re able to think about how health policy can be changed and subsequently affect health and health disparities.
What’s unique about our department in this particular setting is that we’re right in the heart of the state government. There’s a natural collaboration that’s going on between us and various state agencies. Our strength is both our proximity and our familiarity with state government as well as state health policy.
What excites you most about what the department is doing right now?
One of the things that I’m involved with is our partnership with the Virginia Department of Medical Assistance Services, where we’re working on several evaluations for the state Medicaid agency.
There’s a number of Ph.D. students involved as graduate research assistants who are contributing to these evaluations, and I think it’s a great example of providing students with an opportunity to really learn how to do this type of research, apart from the technical skills that they’re gaining in the classroom. They’re able to be at the table with a lot of officials at the agency and see how the process plays out in the real world.
What is your leadership philosophy?
My leadership philosophy is to try to be a facilitator. We’re an academic department, so our faculty, scholars, researchers and educators are all experts in their own right, so what I try to do is facilitate, so access to data, identifying opportunities or identifying people outside of the department that are possible collaborators.
What are your hopes for the future of your department?
My expectation is that as the education programs in the School of Public Health grow, that our department will be a vital part of that.
While we primarily have a faculty that’s focused on research as well teaching Ph.D.s, that our faculty will expand to include more teaching-focused faculty who will be equipped to teach what we think will be a pretty significant expansion in our Master of Public Health program, as well as eventually a bachelor’s program.
So while our research is strong and I see that not changing, and maybe even getting better, I think that we’re going to become even stronger in our educational mission.
Why is now an important time for public health?
I think we’re realizing there’s a whole array of problems that require more than just a clinical response or clinical expertise. As good of work as the health system does, a lot of the health problems that we face need to be addressed more holistically at the societal level and at the policy level.
I think that was the recognition for why the School of Public Health was started, and what we’ll be contributing to the university as well as the state.
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