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Welcome from the Dean

This is what has attracted many of us to academic public health: a desire to be in an environment that simultaneously promotes and values both science and social action.

Achieving the right balance is hard. On one hand, we want researchers to feel free to investigate what they view as important, even if the policy implications may be distant or even unknown. And as members of a university, we want to create an environment that values knowledge generation for its own sake, regardless of its utilitarian value. On the other hand, because we are in a school of public health, and especially because we are in a school that has a historical commitment to policy translation (and in a University with a strong civic engagement mission), we want to stimulate work that is relevant for practice and policy here in Philadelphia and in communities all over the world.

Sometimes research and practice are presented as competing with each other or as dichotomies. But in reality, the relationship between research and practice (or research and policy) is much more nuanced than that. Certainly, research can generate evidence to guide practice and policy. But practice and policy needs can also drive research. In a further illustration of the policy-research interrelations, fundamental and basic knowledge can often be obtained from a simple policy evaluation.

Research can inform policy in many ways: from simple descriptions of the magnitude of a problem, to inferences about causes, to sophisticated analyses of the impacts of real policy changes, to simulation modeling that can help us understand how an intervention can work under varying conditions. Research can also shed light on how scientific evidence gets disseminated, how it is perceived by stakeholders, how it is used (or not used), and how the use of evidence in policy-making can be maximized.

Our School has experienced an extraordinary increase in our research engagement over the past few years. We have strived to link our research to our policy and practice mission in a way that is valuable for practice but that also promotes creativity, innovation and the intellectual thrill of research itself. We hope these page in the Winter 2018 issue of DSPH Magazine will reveal some of the ways we are working to do this together.

Ana V. Diez Roux, MD, PhD, MPH
Dean and Distinguished Professor, Epidemiology
Dornsife School of Public Health