Building a school of public health for Detroit: Meet Dean Lisa Prosser

Lisa Prosser, Ph.D., has spent more than 20 years working in public health - as a researcher, faculty member, academic leader - and through engagement with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). As the inaugural dean of Wayne State University's emerging school of public health initiative, she will work to bring together public health education, research and practice across the university while developing a new school focused on community engagement, research and educational innovation.

What drew you to Wayne State and the opportunity to lead the emerging school of public health?

I've spent more than 20 years working directly with the CDC, and over the past year, I had a front-row seat as the federal public health landscape and funding environment began to shift. These changes caused me to pause and really consider what I wanted to do in the next phase of my career. I've served in a number of leadership roles at the University of Michigan. My most recent role was in central administration in the Office of the Vice President for Research, work that was important but had really taken me out of the field I grew up in. I realized that I really wanted to refocus my career on public health.

I love building new things. When I learned about the opportunity at Wayne State, it was exciting to see a chance to build our public health capacity instead of reacting to current events. It's a bold moment to be building a new school of public health.

Wayne State has been planning this school for more than four years. At any point along the way, the university could have changed course given everything happening in higher education and public health, yet the university has continued to move forward. It's inspiring to be able to join a university so committed to building and elevating its public health work.

What might people learn about you that they wouldn't find on your résumé?

Dean Prosser with her husband, Walid Yassir, and their sons Samer and Khaled.

I always share with my students and mentees that there is a very linear story that can be told from a resume or CV, and then there is the real story.

For me, my family background has been very formative in how I came to public health. I'm the daughter of immigrants, married to a naturalized citizen, with a family that is very multicultural, shaped by a foundation of people building from scratch in a new country. I have two grown sons, one lives in New York, and one is in graduate school in the UAE.

My mother was a refugee after World War II. She spent five years in a United Nations refugee camp before arriving in the United States at age 17 with her father, her brother and a single suitcase. They landed in Boston and were supported by Catholic Charities and a network of community organizations that believed a family's survival was a collective responsibility. My mother first worked in a factory, eventually earned her GED and later went to college taking night classes when she was working at a university, graduating at the age of 53.

My parents raised us with a strong sense of obligation - to education and to the communities that make education possible. That responsibility has never left me. It is the reason I ended up in public health and shapes how I think about the role universities and community organizations can play in changing people's lives.

I'm also a former soccer player, and the experience of being part of a team was a very formative experience for me and shaped how I approach scholarship and my work generally. I'm an interdisciplinary scholar, and all of my research is team science. I love building teams, and I'm looking forward to building this team at Wayne State.

Why is Detroit the right place for a new school of public health?

Prosser, with her husband, Walid Yassir, a clinical professor of orthopaedic surgery in the Wayne State University School of Medicine and a physician at Children's Hospital of Michigan.

The relationship between the city of Detroit and Wayne State is exceptionally close, and the more I learn about the university, the more I appreciate what an incredible foundation that partnership provides.

From the beginning, the vision for the school has been to create an urban-focused school with a strong emphasis on community engagement. We'll be able to begin with a broad base of community-engaged research and practice.

Importantly, we are not building this school from scratch. There is tremendous depth and breadth of public health education, research, practice and service that has been established at Wayne State and in partnership with Detroit for decades.

The opportunity is to bring those pieces together, expand them and elevate them, and create something that is even greater than the sum of its parts.

What do you see as some of the most important public health challenges and opportunities facing Detroit and Michigan?

There are certainly important health challenges. In Detroit, we know there are significant disparities in life expectancy, maternal and infant mortality, and chronic disease. Michigan also lags behind national averages on many health outcomes. As a vaccine policy researcher, I worry a lot about declining vaccination rates and the potential for measles outbreaks.

But I don't think we should establish the school's priorities simply by looking at health metrics. We need to engage with our community partners, government stakeholders, foundations, community organizations, schools, faith-based organizations and the public itself to understand their priorities.

That will be an important part of our first year.

At the same time, when we talk about Detroit, we often focus on the challenges. We also need to recognize the city's strengths - its resilience, history of innovation and the longstanding relationships between community organizations and Wayne State. Those assets will be an important part of how we build the school.

What will your priorities be during your first year?

My first priority will be listening. My door will be open, both literally and figuratively. I'm planning for a series of listening sessions and other opportunities for faculty, staff, students and community members to meet with me individually and in small groups.

I want to understand what people value about the new school and what they want it to become.

We'll also undertake a formal strategic planning process that includes all voices - from across Wayne State as well as our external partners and the public. That process will help us develop a five-year strategic plan.

At the same time, I want to establish an inclusive and collaborative culture. Mentoring and coaching have been important throughout my career, and I've worked to develop formal leadership development and peer-mentoring programs in previous roles. That will be another priority as we bring together faculty, staff and students from across the university; we will work to create an environment where everyone can thrive.

I like to say, 'I'm building the team, and building the fans.'

What role do you see the community playing in shaping the school?

Prosser with student researcher Roopa Darwar.

The community needs to be a partner in this work, not simply a group who is consulted during the planning process.

My vision has three connected pillars: community impact and engagement, research at scale, and educational innovation. For each of those, we need mechanisms that allow us to hear from our partners to shape our work on an ongoing basis.

For example, as we train the next generation of public health leaders, we need to hear from the organizations that employ our graduates. Are our students leaving with the skills they need? What skills will they need in the future? How can we respond?

We also need to distinguish between stakeholder organizations and the broader public. Organizations can represent residents, but they have perspectives of their own. We need to hear directly from the public as well.

One idea I find particularly compelling is creating a citizen advisory panel, a standing body that provides a direct public voice in shaping the priorities of the school.

Personally, I'm excited to join this community. For me, it's always about the people and the mission. And I'm looking forward to living in Detroit and getting to know the city as more than a public health partner but as one of its citizens.

How will your evidence-based approach influence the school's research and priorities?

As an interdisciplinary health policy researcher, I draw on both qualitative and quantitative methods to answer policy questions. I look forward to bringing that same rigorous approach to understanding the priorities of our school.

But there's another way I think about it: the school itself is an intervention.

Wayne State has already developed and implemented public health interventions that have gone on to be used nationally and globally. We'll continue that work. But we should also ask what changes because this school exists.

As a new public health community, we can identify meaningful measures to assess our impact, as a school, over the short and long term. This will be part of our strategic planning process.

Ten years from now, what would make you say you built something special?

In 10 years, I hope we can say that we built a school that has had a real impact on the public health of Detroiters, Michiganders, and people nationally and globally. And we'll be able to measure this using the metrics we've set for ourselves.

I hope we've prepared a new generation of public health leaders to serve locally and globally, and that we've advanced new public health methods and frameworks that others actually use.

Most importantly, I'm excited about bringing together all of the people at Wayne State who are already deeply engaged in public health work. There is so much happening here. By bringing this work together, we can accelerate public health education, research and practice in new ways that would be difficult to achieve alone. Our schools of public health have a role and responsibility to fill the gap being left by our federal health agencies, and Wayne State is poised to create just such a school.