Public Health Shows Up Everywhere

Public health is the reason your drinking water is clean. It's seatbelt laws that have quietly saved millions of lives and air quality alerts that tell you whether it's safe to step outside. Public health is the infrastructure of conditions that allow people to be well.

"Public health is more than just the absence of disease," says Paul Halverson, dean of the Oregon Health & Science University-Portland State University School of Public Health. "It's about creating opportunities for people to live, work and play - to be their best selves, in communities that support everyone's wellness."

Public health is more than just the absence of disease. It's about creating opportunities for people to live, work and play - to be their best selves, in communities that support everyone's wellness.

This means thinking upstream and recognizing that solutions aren't always straightforward. Telling a parent their child needs to exercise more lands differently when the neighborhood doesn't have sidewalks safe enough to walk on or parks to play in. The goal, as Halverson puts it, is to make the healthy choice the default choice.

Ten years ago, Oregon got its second accredited school dedicated to that work. What the OHSU-PSU School of Public Health has accomplished since is a story best told not in statistics, but in the moments and places where public health shows up, which, it turns out, is everywhere.

A Partnership Built to Go Upstream

David Bangsberg was leading the Center for Global Health at Massachusetts General Hospital and teaching at Harvard when he heard that a new school of public health was being imagined in his hometown. He'd grown up in Portland, gone to Lincoln High School, spent summers working at the OHSU Primate Center and watched his stepfather build a career as a PSU professor. So he came home to serve as the founding dean of the new public health school.

The school combined what each institution did best, bringing together PSU's commitment to community-centered learning and a student body rich in first-generation students with OHSU's world class research and statewide health system.

Pairing these two together, Bangsberg learned, was harder than he'd anticipated. Two academic calendars. Two budget models. Five unions. Two presidents and two provosts. While it was complicated and slow at times, he says, his role was meaningful.

For Bangsberg, the school's deepest impact was personal. He kept mornings free for coffee with a student - no agenda, just listening to and learning from students to understand what was working and what wasn't. He called every accepted Master of Public Health student to congratulate them. And he raised money alongside the school's philanthropic advisory board to fund scholarships for first-generation college students - a mission he hadn't fully understood until he arrived at the School of Public Health.

It's entirely possible to graduate from a school of public health and never step foot in a health department or community setting. We're changing that.

"With a little bit of tuition over the course of four years, you change someone's life," he says. "Not only their life - their entire family's life, and their children's life. The difference schooling makes is transformative in people's lives. And the difference you make at this school - I think it's even greater."

This sentiment is reflected in PSU's consistent No. 1 ranking for social mobility in the Pacific Northwest, a distinction it has maintained for more than five years.

Paul Halverson became the school's second dean after more than 30 years in public health serving at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as state health commissioner in Arkansas and as founding dean of Indiana University's School of Public Health. What drew him to the School of Public Health was a partnership rare in the field, one that paired PSU's community roots with OHSU's medical expertise. Under his leadership, the school formalized its first academic health department collaboration Multnomah County, one designed to make the health department as familiar to students as any campus building.

"It's entirely possible to graduate from a school of public health and never step foot in a health department or community setting," Halverson says. "We're changing that."

Where Public Health Shows Up

In 10 years, the school has graduated more than 3,000 public health professionals. Students partner with more than 156 public health organizations while in school, addressing real issues in real communities. Behind the numbers are the people doing the work - here are some of their stories.

The Pandemic Was Her Practicum

Taurica Salmon, MPH '21, discovered public health while working retail at Fred Meyer. She'd taken a class on vaccines at Portland Community College that hooked her, then transferred to PSU, where a course on the social determinants of health - the non-medical, environmental conditions that significantly influence health outcomes - reframed something she'd been carrying: her father's dementia diagnosis. He never smoked, never drank, ate his fruits and vegetables, worked out. "I don't understand," she remembers thinking. But the more she learned about public health, the more everything clicked.

Salmon was midway through the School of Public Health's epidemiology track when COVID-19 shut the world down. This posed a unique opportunity for Salmon when her then-advisor called her up to connect her with a real-world public health role.

SPH had partnered with the Oregon Health Authority to boost a contact tracing program for overwhelmed county health departments across the state.

She called Oregonians in counties she'd never visited to tell them they'd tested positive. She asked about symptoms, travel history and exposure. Often, people had neighbors bringing groceries. But sometimes someone needed help with a bill, or couldn't miss two weeks of work, and Salmon would connect them with a community-based organization that could show up in person.

The work kept expanding. Salmon tracked travelers who tested positive mid-flight, coordinated CDC "do not board" orders, and launched a vaccine access initiative for aging adults and people with disabilities. She accepted a full-time job before finishing her degree.

Today Salmon works as a research and evaluation analyst at Multnomah County. The community-based organizations she leaned on during the pandemic are still the first ones she calls. "Their help is invaluable," she says. "That relationship never goes away."

A Public Health Response to Gun Violence

Jenn Reed, MPH '18, was working at the VA Medical Center in Vancouver when she first noticed a pattern: veterans with PTSD seemed to recover more slowly than other veterans. She didn't have the language for it yet, but she'd stumbled into a public health question.

She enrolled in PSU's Master of Public Health program and took a job at Beaverton Police Department to pay tuition. The work was mission-driven in a way she loved, but it also opened her eyes to how first responders were carrying heavy life experiences they often had nowhere to put.

We're all trying to save the world. Or at least just a little part of it.

Public health gave her a framework to see what policing alone couldn't solve.

She was finishing her degree when Sherril Gelmon, founding director of SPH's health system and policy PhD program, pulled her aside at an event. "I think you should really consider health systems and policy," Gelmon told her. Reed hadn't seen herself as a policy person. Gelmon did. That conversation changed Reed's trajectory.

In 2022, SPH launched the Gun Violence Prevention Research Center to treat gun violence as a public health problem and produce credible data for Oregon policymakers and communities. Reed is now a postdoctoral researcher at the center, examining the mental health of first responders. Her research in Oregon supported a somewhat surprising fact: The biggest firearm-related risk to police officers isn't being shot in the line of duty. It's suicide. And Oregon's data echoes trends across the country.

That finding in addition to her first-hand experience working in law enforcement led her to analyze police department mental health policies. Most agencies had some policies in place, but few were robust or trauma-informed enough to meet the need.

She also collaborates with Healing Hurt People, a program that sends case managers to gunshot victims' bedsides within hours of their arrival - a critical window that research shows can break cycles of repeat violence. There they connect survivors with the resources survivors need to keep themselves and their community safe.

It's one of many community partnerships the center has supported across Oregon, connecting research to the people doing the work on the ground.

"We're all trying to save the world," Reed says. "Or at least just a little part of it."

Every Movement Has a Soundtrack

Before joining the world of public health, Ryan Petteway had poetry & hip-hop - his first "language" for understanding the world around him. He grew up in Steubenville, OH, a city under a Department of Justice consent decree for police brutality where air quality was bad enough to shape federal EPA regulations. Even without the technical terms, music and poetry gave him a way to make sense of what he already knew to be true.

"You don't have any statistics, you don't have a Ph.D. But you know it," Petteway says. "And everybody in your community knows it too."

In grad school at University of Michigan, he discovered social epidemiology: the study of how systemic issues like racism and class inequality impact community health. But he never stopped writing and making music. In Michigan, Petteway recorded The Public Health Mixtape - a seven-track hip hop album on public health themes like asthma, HIV/AIDS and lead poisoning. It was the first time he put the two together. It would not be the last.

We need them to feel something. We don't need them to cite something.

In 2020, Petteway returned to writing poetry with renewed purpose, submitting work to peer-reviewed journals at a time when no one had done it quite that way before. He won back-to-back paper of the year awards. He won a National Poetry Month prize. He was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. The field, he says, had been waiting for someone with "the audacity and the nerve to do it."

Stats & Stanzas grew from that moment.

Now in its fourth year, the annual community event brings together featured poets, musicians, artists and students for something traditional avenues and institutions of public health rarely make a priority - not to present findings or cite evidence, but to feel something together.

Student poetry prize winners read alongside nationally recognized artists. This year's event, themed Living Room after a June Jordan poem, invited the community to consider what it means to have space, dignity and "room to breathe."

Petteway joined the School of Public Health in 2016 as one of its first tenure-track hires. Dawn Richardson, senior associate dean, helped make the first three years of Stats & Stanzas possible through establishing the school's antiracism faculty fellowship program - institutional support that Petteway says was foundational. "None of this really exists without someone making sure it can keep going," he says.

The work, for him, is about more than an annual event. Public health has spent more than 150 years throwing statistics at community health problems. The statistics matter. But they were never enough.

"Every social and political movement of consequence has had artists behind it," Petteway says. "Every movement has a soundtrack. Nothing unfolds without artists providing energy for people to process, to engage, to feel something."

In a field built on data, Stats & Stanzas is a reminder that behind every data point is a person.

"We need them to feel something," he says. "We don't need them to cite something."

Looking ahead: The next 10 years

The School of Public Health's partnership with Multnomah County, the school's first formal academic-health system collaboration, is designed to make the health department feel as natural to students as any campus building. Students work alongside public health practitioners the way medical students rotate through hospitals. Halverson says he hopes to extend this integral student experience to other communities.

"Think about if you were going to a doctor and you found out your doctor has never been in a hospital before," Halverson says. "The same is really kind of true for us."

The real solution comes with upstream thinking - policy, funding streams, behavioral change. Creating mechanisms so disparities don't keep happening.

Edline Francois, MPH '21, knows what that foundation can build. She's three years into her role as public health modernization project manager at Multnomah County and among the first alumni stepping into a mentorship through the school's county partnership.

The work, she says, is always about going further upstream."The real solution comes with upstream thinking - policy, funding streams, behavioral change," Francois says. "Creating mechanisms so disparities don't keep happening."

The ambitions for the next decade reach well beyond Portland. As a school born from the belief that community and medicine belong together, the school carries a responsibility to the entire state - one its faculty describe not just as professional, but ethical. A quarter of the public health workforce is expected to retire or leave in the next three years, and the communities feeling that shortage most acutely are often the ones furthest from the cities.

In 2025, the School of Public Health launched the Rural Public Health Practice Initiative to directly meet that need. Alice Gates, a faculty member who leads the initiative, has been traveling to Coos Bay, Klamath Falls and Eastern Oregon building relationships with local health departments, Tribal communities and rural organizations. The goal is to ensure the curriculum reflects rural realities - not just urban ones - and to create pathways for students in rural communities to pursue a public health degree without leaving their communities.

"You don't just show up one day and say, let's have a relationship," Richardson says. "You have to show up, stay and do the work."

That consistency is already opening doors. Rural student enrollment in the graduate program is up - and the initiative is just getting started.

"We are part of an amazing set of institutions," Gates says, "and we have a responsibility to the whole state and the region to channel those resources - knowledge, people, research capacity, training - into the communities where it's needed."

Looking ahead, the school is developing rural practice experiences that would send students to live and work in communities across the state. One student is already planning theirs in John Day, Oregon.

The school's job, as Halverson sees it, is not just to fill public health vacancies but to send graduates into them ready - with the theoretical foundation and the real-world experience and instincts to be useful on day one.

"It's not good enough to just do our thing and hope for the best," Halverson says. "We need to figure out what people need in the state and how to be an instrumental part of their success."