DrPH Program Links Science and Practice
Among the largest such programs in the world, UIC’s DrPH in Leadership program continues innovating and inspiring
While working in public health, including a 20-year career with the Chicago Department of Health, Dr. Patrick Lenihan saw a tradition-bound field struggling to make transformative change, desperately needing a more enterprising, critical-thinking mindset to take hold.
UIC School of Public Health leadership identified the same gap. That shared recognition made for a perfect marriage back in 2005 as SPH revised its Doctor of Public Health in Leadership (DrPH) degree program and tapped Lenihan, then an SPH adjunct faculty member, as director of the program. He was tasked to bridge the long-standing gap between the science of academia and public health practice by pioneering an effort to transform the DrPH Program into one that combined leadership skills with the evidence base of practice and injected fresh thinking into the public health sector.
“If we’re going to address some of the most challenging public health issues, then we can’t rely on the thinking that caused those problems in the first place,” Lenihan says. “Different results require thinking and acting differently.”
Under Lenihan’s charge for the last 14 years, UIC’s DrPH program has developed a national reputation for its innovative curriculum, serving as a model for other DrPH programs and propelling scores of mid-career public health professionals to craft new, more effective realities in a field yearning for impactful solutions.
“We’re proud to say that our students are solving messy real-world problems, not just addressing esoteric questions removed from the reality of practice,” Lenihan says. “For public health to raise the stature of its scientific basis, it needs leadership to make science more relevant to real-world problems. Our DrPH program is accomplishing just that.”
Building a Winning Program Heading link
As SPH leaders began evaluating the purpose and relevance of the School’s existing DrPH degree in the early 2000s, they noticed a program largely disconnected from a scholarship that would resonate with practice in the evolving public health field. They also saw a program emphasizing technical skills, yet devoid of the necessary leadership skills that would empower students in leadership positions—most of them mid-career professionals holding full-time positions—to drive change in their respective corners of the public health world.
SPH overhauled its DrPH degree in 2005, unveiling a revised program rooted in three pillars—adaptive leadership, evidence-based public health and experience-based learning. According to Lenihan: “You can only learn so much in the classroom. Learning to solve wicked real-world problems requires that the practice setting becomes the classroom and that experience becomes the teacher.”
SPH replaced the typical doctoral exams with a portfolio in which students were charged to demonstrate mastery of their abilities in using leadership to generate and apply knowledge to real-world issues in practice. Mastery of that knowledge base included an in-depth understanding of core areas of public health practice, research and theory; leveraging various assessments and measures to analyze issues; and crafting a vision for leadership incorporating systems thinking and ethical principles.
“Using leadership skills, we join science and practice together to create cross-sector collaboration and approach problems in novel ways,” Lenihan explains.
While eight students comprised the initial DrPH cohort, the program grew in each subsequent year. In 2010, however, SPH embraced a distance-based format for the degree, a shift that invited a more diverse pool of students into a highly desirable doctoral program that quickly grew in reputation nationally as well as globally.
“Taking the DrPH online allowed us to create a program that was more sustainable and capable of making impact at scale,” Lenihan says.
Today, with more than 100 students in its pipeline, UIC’s DrPH is one the largest such programs in the U.S. SPH receives upwards of 120 applications each year from public health professionals currently employed by governmental agencies, professional associations, academia, industry, non-profits, the military and healthcare providers from across the nation and internationally. More than 40 students, meanwhile, have completed their practice-based dissertation. Half of those dissertations have earned publication in scholarly journals while others have been selected for presentation at professional meetings hosted by the likes of the American Public Health Association.
“There’s a hunger out there among working professionals entering leadership ranks of public health organizations to expand their toolkit to tackle some of the most pressing problems facing the field, which have defied more technically oriented approaches of the past,” Lenihan says.
Inspiring Public Health Leaders Heading link
Empowered by a strong foundation for evidence-based public health practice, DrPH students have fueled tangible change in the world–increasing access to services in rural Ethiopia, implementing statewide performance management systems and bolstering engagement among the public health workforce.
Already 17 years into his career with the California Department of Public Health (CDPH), Dr. David Reynen (DrPH ‘16) began his DrPH studies in 2011, eager to broaden his perspective and develop leadership skills that could generate new professional opportunities. Reynen says the DrPH program helped him better understand the interrelated nature of public health systems and provided necessary skills to address overlooked areas.
Propelled by his DrPH work, for instance, Reynen helped optimize operations at the California Stroke Registry (CSR) by spearheading the creation of cross-functional teams, reorganizing the division of labor, delivering a new management information system, and identifying credible external partners who could help CSR achieve its objectives.
“I learned to systematically reflect on the status quo in order to move the system forward,” Reynen says, noting that his efforts with CSR led to his current role as chief of maternal and perinatal epidemiology with CDPH’s Maternal, Child, and Adolescent Health Division. “The DrPH was the best professional decision I made in my life. It revitalized me and motivated me to work hard on problems that are pressing and persistent in order to improve the state’s health.”
Dr. Nonye Harvey (DrPH ‘19), a public health advisor with the National Cancer Institute (NCI), says she was “itching” to do more and evolve her leadership skills when she enrolled in the DrPH program in 2014. Throughout her DrPH studies, Harvey consistently applied classroom lessons to her practice. Her dissertation, in fact, investigated facilitators and barriers to data sharing in NCI-funded research, efforts that spurred a set of recommendations for enhancing data-sharing practices in biomedical research.
“The DrPH program set me up to approach a problem from a systems view and to do so in a nimble way that gets to the underlying issue and helps identify solutions and strategies to move complex problems forward,” says Harvey, who leads strategic planning for her group and serves as executive director of the NCI Cohort Consortium that pursues scientific breakthroughs by promoting collaboration among 60 member epidemiology cohorts.
For Lenihan, it’s these tales that prove so rewarding.
“I love hearing that students and alumni are approaching problems differently because of their DrPH education, that they’re becoming adaptive leaders as opposed to simply better technicians,” he says.
With Lenihan’s retirement on May 31, longtime associate program director Dr. Christina Welter (DrPH ‘10) has been appointed interim director. Welter intends to keep the program’s fingers “on the pulse of the field” and to meet the needs of students as well as public health practice, which is increasingly challenging its professionals to do more with less.
“The foundation of our program is a curriculum that doesn’t look at simple solutions, but rather digs deeper and explores different opportunities and pathways for change,” Welter says. “As our students are active practitioners facing complex issues, we’ll continue working to increase their capacity through evidence building.”
In the coming years, that work will broaden when SPH debuts its Global DrPH program, another pioneering step for the enterprising program. “Wherever our students might be, we want them empowered to investigate different methods, tools and resources to tackle a problem,” Welter says.
After all, critical thinking is what the public health field needs now more than ever.