This story originally published on July 15, 2015 in observance of the COPH’s 30th anniversary celebration.

“USF was chosen as the place for Florida’s College of Public Health,” Dr. Peter Levin wrote in 1984, “because of the broad base of knowledge found in the many colleges of the University and the unique Tampa location.”

Levin, the college’s first dean, expounded further, noting that not only faculty from the colleges of medicine and nursing, but from business, education, engineering, natural sciences and social sciences were “key to the development of the college.”

Three decades of growth and innumerable success stories later, former Fla. Rep. Samuel P. Bell III shed more light on the founding of COPH.

Like many created entities of any kind, it all started with one person’s idea and another person’s decision to act on it.

The idea person was Robert Hamlin, a graduate of the Harvard University College of Public Health. He brought his idea to Bell, dubbed “the godfather of the college” by Charles Mahan, another founder who was COPH dean from 1995 to 2002.

“He had retired to Florida and realized that there was not a college of public health in Florida,” Bell recalled of Hamlin. “He contacted my staff director, John Phelps, with the idea, and John and I discussed the idea and decided that we should pursue the project. When we began the effort, we discovered that there had not been a college of a public health created anywhere in the country for more than 20 years, and most emphasis was on clinical health.

From left: Dr. Donna Petersen, dean of the USF College of Public Health, the late Robert Hamlin and Rep. Sam Bell, “the godfather of COPH.”

“As a member of the Florida Legislature, I could see the results of public health problems – mental health issues, alcoholism, child abuse, heart attack and stroke brought on by lack of exercise and obesity, infant mortality, etc. – yet there was no focus to address these issues. In addition,” Bell said, “there was a shortage of trained public health workers as problems grew and population increased.”

Where to establish the college as a physical entity turned out to be fairly obvious. Logic dictated that the state’s first college of public health had to be part of a public university that had a medical school and was located in an urban area, and USF was the only institution in the state that met all three requirements.

“There was no bill,” Bell said of the necessary legislative action that followed. “The college was first created by a line item in the state appropriation. Of course, we had to work the proposal through the Board of Regents and the USF administration.”

All of it moved with surprising quickness and ease, he said, underscoring an idea whose time had come. Naturally, it didn’t hurt that its biggest proponent was in prime position to do it the most good.

“The College’s success must first recognize the man who made it all possible,” said Dr. Heather Stockwell, the first faculty hire in the college’s Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics.

“Without Sam Bell,” she said, “there would be no COPH.  Before our college was formed, there were no schools of public health in Florida. It was through the vision and leadership of Sam Bell that our college was formed and its funding secured in its early years so that it could grow and develop into the College we are all so proud of today!”

From left: Dr. Martha Coulter, Dr. Heather Stockwell and Dr. Peter Levin, first dean of COPH, ca. 1988.

“Sam Bell was absolutely committed to the idea that there needed to be a strong college of public health in this state,” Dr. Martha Coulter agreed. “He single-handedly got absolute support for us from the state legislature, so that we were not dependent completely on federal funds and training grants.”

“There was not much opposition to the effort,” Bell said. “It really flew under the radar. I was in leadership during all of this time and was chair of the appropriations committee in the House for the years 1985 through 1988, for four sessions. Before that, I had chaired the rules committee and was majority leader, so I was in a position to get support. After the College was initially approved, I was able to guide funding.”

If founding the college had seemed relatively easy, running it in the early days was not. Being the only college of public health in Florida created a heavy work load at the same time it underscored the demand for what a college of public health delivers.

The first year, Coulter and the other two faculty members in the Department of Community and Family Health traveled regularly to teach at the Florida Department of Health offices in Tallahassee and at USF-Sarasota, as well as in Tampa, said Coulter. There simply was no one else to do the job.

From left: Jennifer Harrell, filmmaker and documentarian Frederick Wiseman, Dr. Marti Coulter and the late James Harrell in an undated photo.  The Harrell Center is named for Harrell and his wife, Jennifer.

“Of course, this was before you could take things online,” she said, “and it certainly was a lot easier for us to go there than for all of them to come here.”

Simply finding space was another challenge. Originally housed on the first floor of the present Continuing Education building, the fledgling college wouldn’t see its own building for another seven years.

Community and Family Health had a particularly hard time finding a permanent home, Coulter said. It would reside alongside the college’s other departments in the present Continuing Education building, then move to the first floor of the University Professional Center, then find space in the Florida Mental Health Institute (now Behavioral and Community Sciences) building.

“I had to bend my head down to get into the attic to get into my office,” recalled Dr. Paul Leaverton, first chair of the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics.

“Then we took over the auditorium. It used to be a basketball auditorium – just wherever we could find room, and that was where we were ’til ’91, when we moved into this building. We kept moving around in funny little quarters, so this building was really nice – and it still is.”

COPH groundbreaking ceremony for it’s $10-million building, March 1990.

Artist’s rendering of the COPH building.

A royal opening

Almost everyone expects fanfare at any major debut, the opening of a new building at a major university posing no exception, but probably no one expected the kind of pomp and circumstance that played at the USF College of Public Health’s opening of its own building in 1991.

A month before the building’s official dedication, two weeks before faculty and staff even began moving in, the first lecture was delivered by a scientist, and yet the affair was literally regal.

With an entourage of attendants by her side, Professor Dr. Her Royal Highness Princess Chulabhorn of Thailand, a biochemist, arrived in a police-escorted motorcade of limousines to speak about her research on medicinal plants.

Leaverton talked recently about how the building’s unusual opening came to pass.

“In the late ’80s, I had done a lot of work in Thailand with NIH and Thai scientists on the epidemiology of aplastic anemia,” Leaverton said.

Thailand had an unusually high rate of the rare but serious blood disorder, Leaverton said, and the group set out to investigate why.

“My colleague over there was probably the top scientist in Thailand. He was a really good medical scientist,” he said, “and he was also the king’s doctor.”

The king was a believer in education, Leaverton said, and his four children eagerly shared that belief. All earned advanced degrees, and two earned doctorates. Leaverton’s Thai counterpart was a friend of Princess Chulabhorn’s, having done post-graduate work with him in Germany.

“So even though she’s a multimillionaire as the king’s daughter, they took it to heart that they should give back to the community. So she got an education in science and directs her own research institute, mostly in cancer.

“I had not met her, but I had heard of her and knew she liked to give lectures occasionally, so I asked my friend, ‘Do you think she’d ever like to give a lecture at USF?’ He said, ‘I’ll ask her.’

A short time later, back at USF and ready to re-settle into his routine, Leaverton had a surprise waiting for him.

“The next thing I know, my phone’s ringing, and it’s the ambassador from Thailand asking if I’d like the princess to speak at USF.”

The answer was yes, and the ambassador personally flew down from Washington to make the arrangements.

“He sounded pretty upset,” Leaverton said, “but they have to handle the royal family with kid gloves. Turned out he was a wonderful man, and he came down a couple of times. We had to meet with the mayor of Tampa and the chief of police to make sure the princess got a motorcade from the airport to her hotel – she took over three floors at the new Wyndham – and from her hotel to USF and back again, no stopping at red lights. So it was quite a show.

“The building wasn’t scheduled to open until December, but to make her schedule, she could only come in November, so the dean opened the building just to accommodate her, which I thought was nice.

News story on Thailand’s Princess Chulabhorn’s royal visit for the COPH opening, November 1991.  Pictured with the princess (left) are Drs. Peter Levin (second from left) and Paul Leaverton, who watch as a student from Thailand extends a greeting.

“It was a packed audience. She gave a very technical lecture that no one understood except the biochemists, but it was a big show, and we got to have lunch with the president of the university. It was a royal opening for the college.”

When the college first opened for classes, Leaverton said, a few students were admitted even before the departments were created. After they were created, the departments didn’t last long initially.

Dean Levin created the initial four of COPH’s present five departments and recruited four professors from other institutions to chair them.

From left: Dennis Werner, senior research coordinator, Jan Marshburn, research assistant, and Lesley Bateman, PR and development coordinator, move into the new COPH building in November 1991.

Leaverton was brought in from the National Institutes of Health, and before that, the University of Iowa, to head Epidemiology and Biostatistics. Dr. Stewart Brooks would leave the University of Cincinnati to lead Environmental and Occupational Health. Dr. Stan Graven came from the University of Missouri to direct Community and Family Health. Dr. Tom Chirikos from Ohio State University would take the reins in Health Policy and Management.

“In early ’85,” Leaverton recalled, “the dean got to thinking maybe we didn’t need departments. We could just follow what he called the Texas model – no departments, just one big happy family. But the four chairs who had been recruited to be chairmen of departments objected mightily, and besides, I tried to convince the dean, students tend to think of themselves along discipline lines anyway, whether you call them departments or not. So he relented and re-created the four departments.”

Typical of the new departments, “Epi and Biostats,” as Leaverton calls it, consisted of two people. He and Stockwell were it for the time being, but that was about to change, although maybe not as quickly as they would have liked.

“The legislature was wonderfully generous,” Leaverton said. “They gave us a lot of tenure-track lines, almost unheard of in the creation of a new school. As chairman of Epi and Biostats, I had six tenure-track lines. Two of them were filled by Dr. Stockwell and me, but we had to recruit for the other four.

“Dr. Stockwell and I both had pretty high standards – she had been at Hopkins. We had a file of about 30 people. We rejected all of them. We didn’t think they were good enough to be on our faculty.

“So we had to start the recruiting process all over again, and she and I did all the teaching for that first year, because we were a two-person faculty. We did have a few adjuncts, maybe, here and there, and we eventually filled the faculty positions for the next year.”

Leaverton chaired the department until 1995, then remained as a professor for another six years. He retired as an emeritus professor in 2001.

Memories

The founders and early leaders of COPH have more memories than just those that deal with the college’s inception and its early operation, more memories than space could ever allow, including a few on the lighter side.

“When she was president of the university, she knew everybody on campus,” Coulter recalled of Betty Castor, “and when I got the funding to start the Harrell Center, I was walking across the campus behind the administration building, and she was walking back to her office from somewhere. She saw me all the way across the grounds and yelled out, ‘Hi, moneybags!’

Sam Bell and Betty Castor, former USF president and Florida Secretary of Education, at the COPH 25th anniversary gala, December 2009.

“She knew everybody and supported everybody, and no matter that I was an associate professor in the College of Public Health, she knew.”

“I recall conducting a final exam in epidemiology one evening in which two unusual events occurred,” said Leaverton. “First, a student came to me in obvious pain. She had accidentally put the wrong kind of eye drops in her eyes, which were nearly swollen shut. Okay, she was excused.

“Then, another lady went into labor. We called 911 and sent her to the hospital. It turned out to be a false alarm – she delivered two weeks later. Maybe my exams were too frightening.”

“Being a fan of Chevy Chase and SNL, especially his take-offs on the clumsiness of President Gerald Ford, I purposely stumbled up the auditorium stairs and fell against the podium on the stage, scattering papers everywhere,” Mahan recalled. “This was at one of our graduation convocations. Instead of the audience laughing at my parody of Chevy, they all thought it was real and rushed to the stage to help me – very embarrassing! I think it’s funny now, but I have a very bizarre sense of humor.”

The particulars vary from person to person, but the size, scope and overall success of the college are unanimous themes for the people who were there in its earliest days. In one way or another, all said they could not have foreseen in 1984 what it is on its 30^th anniversary.

“I don’t think we could have imagined,” Coulter said, “the ability to move as strongly as it has in the direction of being a research one university – USF as a whole and the College of Public Health as a leader in that regard. I don’t think we quite envisioned it that way. That has been very exciting.

“Also, the expansion of the whole global health department, the global health focus, and the ability to do international public health work with researchers that are in the global health unit. That really hadn’t been anticipated,” she said.

“I think Donna Petersen coming here was a huge milestone,” she added. “I think she is absolutely extraordinary. Without Donna’s leadership, we could not have gone as far as we’ve gone. She’s given us a lot of support for community-based research, and that’s been critical in terms of the direction that we’ve gone.”

“I’m very pleased with how well our students have done,” Leaverton said. “It’s kind of shocking, in a way. As I look back, we must have organized the curriculum pretty well, Heather [Stockwell] and I. We had to basically design it from scratch. We set up some pretty good courses, and they essentially stayed the same for a long time. We had some good faculty who kept the standards high.

COPH student Sherri Berger as a model for a National Public Health Week poster, March 1996.  She now is chief operating officer at the Centers for Disease Control.

“I actually saw some memos that said, ‘Don’t take Epi and Biostats at the same time, it’s too hard. You have to take them separately,’” Leaverton said. “Sometimes I would take some pride in that. We never made soft courses. Our courses were tough.”

Past, Future and Present

The few shortcomings the college’s founders can think of actually only further reflect the college’s success.

“If I could change one thing,” Stockwell said, “it would be to have a much larger building. The college’s rapid growth has resulted in a need for more space. Maybe we could add a floor?”

“Our beautiful building should have been built to be able to add additional stories,” Mahan concurred.

For Leaverton, it would be an epidemiology laboratory, something he said he and Dr. Doug Schocken, a cardiology professor, tried twice to get funded by NIH.

“If I could do that over, I would pursue that even more vigorously. But we tried,” he said.

Mahan said he sees the college’s future dependent upon “a stronger marriage” between the college and the state and local health departments.

Former COPH Dean Dr. Charles Mahan (above left, below right) participates in an exercise with the Hillsborough County Fire Rescue Hazardous Materials Unit, April 2000.

“What if you got your medical degree or nursing degree but never saw a patient and never went into a hospital? Well, why are we giving people public health degrees, and they never set foot in a health department, and they don’t work in the community, which is where the problems are?”

Mahan believes that national accreditation of health departments should be as universal as accreditation for colleges and universities, and that closing the gap between public health education and practice is the way to achieve it. COPH would help a health department earn accreditation, with the understanding that once it became accredited, it would become an “official outpost of the USF College of Public Health.”

“I hope the emphasis on a strong research program will continue,” Leaverton said. “Public health programs need to be based upon sound science, of course. I hope that never changes.”

“What I would like to see the college do is continue on the path that it’s on in terms of really being a leader in the country in community-based research,” Coulter said, “increasing its role as an intermediary between research and practice, and having a committed sense of responsibility to community service providers.”

“Over the next five years,” Stockwell said, “I think – or at least I hope – that public health in general will focus on a positive approach to health, not just disease prevention but improving the quality of health and health maintenance for all our citizens. To do this there will need to be a strong interdisciplinary approach to developing strategies that focus on primary prevention and sustainability at the community level.

“I think our college is uniquely positioned to address these issues,” she said. Its interdisciplinary educational focus positions it as a leader in public health education, and our emphasis on the development of high-quality, collaborative, community-based  research seeks to provide critical information to policy makers to address current and future public health concerns locally, nationally and internationally.”

From left: Susan Webb and Drs. Michael Reid and Phillip Marty establish the Public Health Leadership Institute with a grant from the CDC and ASPH, January 1995.

Stockwell remained with COPH until 2014, when she retired as professor emerita.

But between all the memories of COPH’s beginnings, all its history, successes, scarce shortcomings and envisioned futures stands the here and now.

“If imitation is the greatest form of flattery,” he said, “then we should be flattered, because every university in the state wants a college of public health.

“The College is having impact around the world. I had thought it would be a mecca for public health in Florida and a source of information and advice for state decision-makers. It has done that and much more. We now have graduates working on every continent. Our faculty are internationally recognized. Our students are studying and doing internships around the world. We are attracting major grants, and the research continues to grow.

“I am very proud of what the College has become and what it has done to touch lives around the world,” the college’s “godfather” concluded.

“It has far exceeded my hopes and expectations.”

The USF College of Public Health solves global problems and creates conditions that allow every person the right to universal health and well-being. Make a gift today and help the COPH to advance the public’s health for the next 30 years and beyond. 

Story by David Brothers, USF College of Public Health; photos courtesy of COPH and various faculty.

Related media:
30th anniversary website

The post An Idea Whose Time Had Come: Florida’s First College of Public Health appeared first on College of Public Health News.

First published on October 20, 2014 in observance of the COPH’s 30^th anniversary celebration.

October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month.

Like many entities directed at the greater public good, the USF College of Public Health’s Harrell Center was the product of a private philanthropist’s gift. James Harrell and his family wanted to do something to help eliminate family violence, and they acted on that desire. The result was a 1997 endowment that set the stage for what has become an international force.

“The intent of the Harrell family was to provide a center that would focus on family violence,” affirmed Dr. Martha Coulter, the center’s founding director, “but they were particularly interested in looking at the prevention of family violence, as well as research that would be directly applicable to prevention and intervention.

“So the mission of the Harrell Center, really, is to be an intermediary between research and practice, to do research that is focused on family violence intervention and prevention across the lifespan.

“The grant was an endowment, so the funding is very limited, because it’s just the interest on the endowment. Now, most of the income is from other grants and contracts,” Coulter said, “but what the Harrell endowment did was provide the base for doing that kind of research.”

Brick sponsored by the Harrell Center in remembrance of James Harrell after his death in 2007.

One of three faculty members at the center full-time, Coulter, whose doctorate is in maternal and child health, teaches three courses: Family and Community Violence, Child Maltreatment, and Child Health, in addition to coordinating the maternal and child health academic concentration at COPH.

“In the very beginning, there was only the grant and the establishment of the center conceptually,” she said. “Over the years, we’ve developed.”

That development recently necessitated alignment into three divisions.

“The specific divisions – the redesigning of the organizational chart – has really been something that I’ve done this year,” Coulter said. “Before that, over the years, we’ve just developed these different projects and all worked together, but it looked like now we were at a place where we really needed to have a little bit more separate organization and to develop some strategic goals and objectives in each of those content areas.”

The result is a children’s services division directed by Dr. Lianne Estefan, an intimate partner violence division directed by Coulter, and an elder mistreatment division directed by Dr. Carla Vandeweerd. Dr. Karen Liller recently joined the center as a regular collaborator focusing her attention on the overlap between child maltreatment and unintentional injury, Coulter said, and “usually about 10” graduate students round out her staff. A community advisory board is among the center’s numerous external extensions.

“The children’s section has been very involved in looking at issues regarding the prevention of violence in the community,” Coulter explained, “and the center has developed a virtual research institute with one of the community agencies, Champions for Children, which is a multi-program unit, so that we can do research that is truly collaborative. We’ve worked very consistently with them over the years.”

Graphic that Harrell Center graduate assistant Natasha Hojati created for the Center’s Facebook page.

Coulter said that much of what her intimate partner violence section does involves the courts, so much so that she has become a regular consultant for the courts and has undertaken the task of evaluating the effectiveness of their intervention programs for batterers. Developing and continually improving guidelines for batterer intervention and responses to the needs of victims have been major off-shoot projects.

Among the section’s more significant research findings is that female batterers are falling through the cracks. While the county’s intervention for male batterers has been “very effective,” Coulter said, it has largely failed to successfully intervene with female batterers, who comprise about 15 percent of all convicted batterers in Hillsborough County.

“The clinical providers of these programs,” she said, “have been saying for a long time that they didn’t think the state-mandated curriculum for men was really the right curriculum to use for women.”

Among many leaders and dignitaries who have visited the Harrell Center over the years was then-Attorney General Janet Reno, who attended an elder abuse conference sponsored by the Center in 2001. The attorney general is pictured above with students Seraphine Pitt (left) and Carol Williams, and below with Dr. Coulter.

The elder mistreatment division concentrates on elders with dementia and the kinds of violence against them, which is, Coulter said, “fairly common, unfortunately, from both spousal caretakers and children taking care of elderly parents. The dynamics of this are very different from other sorts of domestic violence and really have a lot to do with people not understanding how to help people who have dementia.”

Coulter said she considers a new project in the division to be particularly tantalizing and potentially groundbreaking.

Called the Senior Surfers Project, Coulter said it looks at the rapidly expanding but little-known phenomenon of women over 50 seeking relationships online and getting responses from people who wind up physically, emotionally or financially harming them.

All previous research on Internet connections leading to violent encounters has been on adolescents, she said, so Senior Surfers is another project aiming to keep potentially overlooked victims out of the cracks – in this case, the cracks that open at the nexus of society and technology.

Dr. Coulter chats with Judge Dennis Alvarez (left) and James Harrell at a 1997 function.

With so much involvement in the local community, including working closely with the Spring and, until its recent demise thanks to funding shortfalls, the Family Justice Center, the Harrell Center’s global impact might be surprising to some, but global involvement has proven beneficial on numerous fronts.

Dr. Pnina S. Klein, a clinical and developmental psychologist and professor of education at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, recently led a Mediational Intervention for Sensitizing Caregivers workshop on campus to promote cognitive functioning and attachment by improving parent-caregiver interactions with infants and young children.

Attendees included community professionals, physicians and COPH students, faculty and staff.  Dr. Robert Nelson, a joint professor in COPH and the Morsani College of Medicine, sponsored attendance by a visiting group of physicians and clinicians from Ecuador.

“It’s been used all over the world,” Coulter said of MISC. “The outcomes internationally of this program have shown that it’s very effective in strengthening attachment and reducing child maltreatment, so we brought Dr. Klein here from Israel this year to do a training for community people and staff here, as well as faculty and students.”

Dr. Martha Coulter, Harrell Center founding director (right in both photos), in Ecuador in 2007.

Elsewhere on the international front, Coulter is working with the medical school in Panama to begin collecting information and developing guidelines for Panamanian health providers to improve their responses to intimate partner violence. She’s also working in Quito, Ecuador, to develop a program that will provide fundamental intervention services for indigenous populations.

Children in a remote Himalayan village in India read books sent to them by the Harrell Center.

Coulter went to India in 2012 with a group that collected data on maternal/child health and family violence among the 26 indigenous tribes in the Himalayas as a response to one tribal leader’s interest in addressing those issues. Progress has been slow, she said, because the tribes are not formally centralized in any way, and the terrain is difficult and isolating. The center recently collected books to send to children there. A librarian navigates dirt paths on a bicycle to deliver them.

Not surprisingly, Coulter’s five-year vision for the Harrell Center is about more expansion, mostly ideological, and lots of it.

“I would like to expand our depth in looking at female offenders and the way the courts respond to them,” she said.

“We’ve applied for some grants to look with a lot more depth at issues related to fathers. This is an area that has been somewhat neglected and needs a lot of attention. What are the ways that we can help fathers from the very beginning develop the kinds of skills that will be more nurturing and less likely to produce problems?

“As far as the center itself,” she said, “I think the area that we really need to expand the most is our capacity for doing community training and education and technical assistance.”

“I’d also like to see us focus on more primary intervention in a public health direction.   A lot of what we’ve done has been secondary response intervention, but I would like to see us working with primary situations – families, parent-child relationships.”

Coulter said an example of the center’s involvement in this area is its participation in the Hillsborough County Violence Prevention Collaborative, a plan for reducing violence throughout the county.

Community events also make Coulter’s expansion list. Recent ones have included fundraisers with artists and bands, and even a biker run.

“I would like to see us expand these community events, because they have been very helpful. The center doesn’t have much funding,” she said, “and the funding that we get is almost always research funding, so if we want to do things that are outside the research arena, we have to raise the money ourselves.”

Story by David Brothers, College of Public Health. Photos courtesy of Dr. Martha Coulter, Eric Younghans, Dr. Robert Nelson, USF Health and the Harrell Center.

The post Harrell Center a local and international force in violence prevention appeared first on College of Public Health News.

Born and raised in Mumbai (formerly Bombay), India, USF College of Public Health (COPH) alumna Dr. Lynette Menezes immigrated to the United States after completing her undergraduate degree in microbiology and master’s degree in social work (MSW) from the University of Mumbai.

Menezes was first introduced to the field of public health at the age of 14 when she began volunteering to teach “street children,” children who depend on the streets for their survival. These children may live on the streets, work on the streets, have support networks on the streets or a combination of the three. 

In high school, she began volunteering at a leprosy hospital visiting with patients and witnessing firsthand the immense suffering from a stigmatizing disease.

“These visits motivated me, my siblings and friends to form a youth group and raise awareness about leprosy,” Menezes said. “Our hope was that by promoting early detection and treatment we could prevent the neurological effects of the disease and, thus, reduce the stigma associated with the accompanied disfigurement.”

Upon graduating with her microbiology degree, Menezes began working in a hospital laboratory—but she wanted more.

“Through my networks, I learned that a rural hospital serving leprosy patients was in need of a basic lab. I joined the Mukta Jeevan Leprosy Hospital and established a lab for the hospital providing basic lab diagnostics,” she said. “Living amidst leprosy patients for nearly two years was a life-changing experience. I knew that I needed an advanced degree if I wanted to make a difference in improving the health of marginalized communities. As there was no public health degree in India at the time, I enrolled and graduated with a MSW degree with a concentration in health.”

When Menezes made the move the U.S to join her husband, she jumped at the opportunity to earn an advanced degree in public health.

“I met with Dr. Bob McDermott, the chair of the former Department of Community and Family Health, who introduced me to Dr. Martha Coulter, former director of the Harrell Center,” she said. “They were both very welcoming and convincing about the PhD program at the COPH, and I was excited to enroll.”

As a new immigrant Menezes said she had little idea about the American educational system and the expectations of graduate students, but that everyone at the college was kind and welcoming.

“One of the senior students, Brenda Morrissette, now Dr. Brenda Joly, who was a year ahead of me in the PhD program was particularly helpful and supportive. I was so moved by her sincerity and graciousness to help me, and we have remained friends since,” she said. “Growing up in a competitive milieu in Mumbai, she was a wonderful role model for me. The other activities I enjoyed the most were the classroom deliberations and debates with faculty and peers on any given public health topic and learning from and commiserating with my peers after hours when the going was rough.”

Graduating with her PhD in public health, Menezes has been with USF Health ever since.

“After my first stint at the Chiles Center as a data analyst for the National Friendly Access Program, I was hired by the USF Division of Infectious Disease to expand their global programs and joined as an instructor and director of USF Health International” she said. “In 2006, I expanded these programs across the entire USF Morsani College of Medicine (MCOM), becoming the founding director of the USF Health International program at MCOM and an assistant professor in the Division of Infectious Disease.”

Menezes is currently the assistant vice president and assistant dean for international affairs at USF Health MCOM. In her roles, she’s been building and supporting international programs, faculty and student exchange in 38 countries.

She also founded the international medicine scholarly concentration for medical students where she teaches global public health principles and pioneered a robust medical student exchange program between USF and 25 academic institutions in 14 countries. The students engage in research as well as clinical training.

“In these roles, I have loved the opportunity to create, sustain and support global programs for USF Health students and faculty across the four colleges by mobilizing the diverse faculty and staff expertise at USF Health,” she said. “As a bonus, I have gotten to interact with some of the smartest and most interesting individuals from varied cultural backgrounds at USF and abroad. I’ve learned so much from their personal and professional stories of overcoming obstacles on their journey to success.”

COPH Alumni Fast Five

• What did you dream of becoming when you were young?
  • A doctor.
• Where would we find you on the weekend?
  • Volunteering with the homeless, reading, walking in a park or cooking.
• What is the last book you read?
  • “Paradise,” by Abdulrazak Gurnah.
• What superpower would you like to have?
  • To convert the skeptics that climate change is real and must be reversed.
• What’s your all-time favorite movie?
  • “The Sound of Music.”

Story by Caitlin Keough, USF College of Public Health

The post Dr. Lynette Menezes honored with USF COPH Outstanding Alumni Award appeared first on College of Public Health News.

USF College of Public Health’s Dr. Martha Coulter recently established a legacy gift with USF Health’s Office of Development and Alumni Relations to support the USF Harrell Center for the Study of Family Violence. These planned gifts are deferred commitments made through one’s estate to ensure that their philanthropic intentions carry on their legacy, long after their lifetime.

The Harrell Center was originally created through a private endowment by James and Jennifer Harrell. Its mission is to develop and integrate knowledge with best practices to strengthen community responses to family violence. It’s designed to conduct and translate research into usable information for practitioners, to provide education and training, and to serve as a resource and advocacy center for the public and professionals.

Coulter, Professor Emerita at the COPH and founding director of the Harrell Center, dedicated her career to improving the lives of families and children. With this gift, she hopes that the Harrell’s mission and research can continue to do more to help victims of family violence and the systemic problems associated with it.

“Next year will be 25 years since I was given the grant funding for the Harrell Center by the Harrell family” Coulter said, “I was the director for 22 of those years right up until I retired. It’s very close to my heart and I feel very strongly that family violence is an issue that is critical to understand and prevent.  It is an underlying problem to a great number of health and mental health issues, as well as a chronic community issue. The pandemic has brought family violence to the forefront of our attention as we recognize the increases in many forms of family violence due to isolation and stress.”

Some family violence issues that Coulter hopes gets more support are in preventive measures, therapeutic interventions and survivor resources once they are out of a violent situation. She also wants more multidisciplinary research that delves into understanding the root causes of family violence.

“There is so much more that the center could conduct if it had more money. In addition to research, they could do more training, consultation and support for community agencies and expand into other areas which is what I’m hoping to do with this gift. I want to help, but to also encourage others to donate as well. I think this is the way we’ll be able to move the center into accomplishing all of its goals,” Coulter said. “While the center has been successful in acquiring research grants and contracts over the years, these are for very specific research projects and there is much need for additional, more flexible funding. For example, helping community agencies to evaluate their programs is a frequent request.”

Coulter also commented on the great current leadership of the Harrell Center, the support of its advisory board members and the ongoing support from the USF COPH and its community which have all helped the center really blossom into what it is today.

“Dr. Coulter made a generous planned gift to support the Harrell Center for the Study of Family Violence, for both operating needs and endowment, so that the important work of the Center goes on in perpetuity,” said Kara Steiner, senior director of development and alumni engagement for USF Health Office of Development and Alumni Relations. “As the former director, and a current board member, she understands more than anyone how important funding is to maintain the programs and community partnerships that exist. 

To learn more about making an estate commitment to the College of Public Health, contact Kara Steiner at 813-458-9149 or karasteiner@usf.edu. 

Story by Caitlin Keough, USF College of Public Health

The post Dr. Martha Coulter supports the Harrell Center through legacy gift appeared first on College of Public Health News.

Public health researchers have found that youth are less likely to carry a weapon if they experience a strong sense of social cohesion—in other words social connectedness—people willing to help neighbors, people getting along well, people sharing the same beliefs about right and wrong and people solving community problems.

USF College of Public Health alumna Dr. Yingwei Yang along with Dr. Abraham Salinas-Miranda, associate director of the COPH’s Center of Excellence in Maternal and Child Health and director of the Harrell Center for the Study of Family Violence, and COPH professors Dr. Karen Liller, director of the Activist Lab and Dr. Martha Coulter were part of the research team whose article “Understanding Weapon Carrying Behaviors of Youth in Florida Schools Using Structural Equation Modeling,” has been published in the journal of Violence and Gender.  

Using data from a county-wide community survey conducted among more than 26,000 youths attending public middle and high schools in Hillsborough County, Fla., Yang and the research team look at both the risk and protective factors influencing whether a youth decides to carry a weapon.  

Salinas-Miranda said they used the socio-ecological model as the theoretical framework and structural equation modeling as the analytical method to examine what impact community factors (neighborhood problems and social cohesion), family factors (adult caring relationships at home) and individual factors (substance abuse), had on weapon carrying at school.

“Testing theoretical frameworks that can inform action to address youth violence is very important,” he said. “Notably, we were the first to test this conceptual of the interlinked effects of the community and family contexts on youth reported behaviors about carrying weapons.”

They found that social connectedness, measured as neighborhood social cohesion, had a strong positive association with adult caring relationship and served as a protective factor, while substance use became a strong risk factor for youth.

They conclude that programmatic efforts to address the direct and indirect associations of multilevel factors related to weapon carrying need to be considered in the development, implementation, and evaluation of evidenced-based violence prevention programs.

“As we can see of late, violence is an extremely critical issue in public health,” said Liller. “We know now that violence is a leading cause of death of children and young adults. Research such as this that brings together behavior and the environment when it comes to weapon carrying is extremely valuable in terms of the development, implementation, and evaluation of targeted prevention programs.”

Yang said she hopes this research provides more insight into the complexity of factors influencing a youth’s decisions to carry a weapon. “Besides the implications for the prevention of weapon carrying behaviors, this research also provides insights on how to operationalize the widely used socio-ecological model and assess the interrelationships among community, family, and individual factors,” she said. “This paper meant a lot to me since it was my first time to apply an advanced statistical method that I learned from faculty in COPH into practice and dissemination. I really appreciate the guidance and support from Drs. Salinas, Liller, and Coulter.”

Story by Anna Mayor, USF College of Public Health

The post Social connectedness and substance use impacts weapon carrying behavior among youth appeared first on College of Public Health News.

Calling it “a dream come true,” Dr. Abraham Salinas-Miranda has been appointed director of the USF College of Public Health’s (COPH) Harrell Center, whose mission is to develop and integrate knowledge with best practices to strengthen community responses to family violence.

Salinas-Miranda, a medical doctor trained in Nicaragua who came to the COPH as Fulbright Scholar and earned both his MPH and PhD from the COPH, has been at the center since 2015, serving in a variety of capacities.

“I like that I can combine my research and clinical expertise with the work of local community agencies addressing multiple forms of family violence—for example, intimate partner violence, child neglect and abuse and elder mistreatment—with other, overlapping forms of violence, such as sexual and gun violence,” said Salinas-Miranda. “The unique way the Harrell Center does this is by actively participating, collaborating and co-learning with the community. I appreciate that it’s not just passive transmission of information about best practices. It’s a co-learning process.”

Salinas-Miranda says his interest in the study of family violence was inspired by community and academic mentors (in medicine and public health), and especially by the mentorship of the Harrell Center’s former director, Dr. Martha Coulter. 

“She guided me on the value of community partnerships for addressing domestic violence, the importance of being present for community organizations and survivors, and how university faculty (and students) can make a significant difference serving in their roles as educators and researchers,” said Salinas-Miranda.

Some of Salinas-Miranda’s immediate plans for the future of the Harrell Center include:

• adding to its senior faculty, drawing upon the many professors and researchers at the COPH, USF Health and other USF colleges studying violence-related topics
• pursuing cutting-edge research on the intersection of adverse childhood experiences with intimate partner violence perpetration and victimization
• obtaining collaborative grants
• developing fundraising strategies for community-engagement projects

According to Salinas-Miranda, violence is one of the greatest public health challenges of our time and to stir sociocultural change, policy makers have to work in tandem with communities.

“Violence is behind so many public health issues—obesity, depression, unwanted pregnancy, suicides, substance abuse and more—that we are trying to eliminate. We as humans are relational beings. We depend on our relationships to develop and adapt. Growing up in violent and abusive environments sets patterns of beliefs and behavior that are transmitted to future generations and increases our vulnerability to health issues.”

Story by Donna Campisano, USF College of Public Health

The post Dr. Abraham Salinas-Miranda named director of the COPH’s Harrell Center appeared first on College of Public Health News.

National Youth Violence Prevention Week is April 8-12

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention:

• Every day in this country, 13 young people are victims of a homicide.
• Nearly 33 percent of high school kids have been in a physical fight in the last year.
• Roughly 16 percent of high schoolers have carried a weapon on one or more days in a 30-day period.

In his role as research faculty at the Harrell Center for the Study of Family Violence, Dr. Abraham Salinas-Miranda, a USF College of Public Health (COPH) visiting research scholar and COPH alumnus, has been examining some of the determinants of juvenile violence.

The mission of the Harrell Center is to provide education, training, research and advocacy on family violence, as well as other forms of violence, such as juvenile violence and community violence. The Harrell Center serves as a bridge between academia and the community, and frequently engages in collaborative projects with community organizations tackling multiple forms of violence in Tampa Bay.

Salinas and his Harrell Center colleagues have been involved in Safe and Sound Hillsborough, a violence-prevention collaborative in Hillsborough County that addresses violence in the community. Some of the partners in the collaborative include the county’s public defenders, school board, health department and law enforcement, among others. The former director of the Harrell Center, Dr. Martha Coulter (Salinas’ former mentor), helped develope these efforts in collaboration with the community partners and also evaluated them.  

After Safe and Sound Hillsborough surveyed a large majority of the public schools in Hillsborough County (more than 27,000 students took part), Salinas and other researchers took the dataset and have continued to analyze it, testing multiple hypotheses of theoretical and practical importance for juvenile violence prevention.

“The idea,” said Salinas, “is to get additional insight beyond the report, specifically information that can potentially elucidate pathways for [juvenile violence] intervention.”

In analyzing the data, Salinas and his colleagues have been able to pinpoint some of the factors that can help protect youth against violence.

Number one is what Salinas calls “social cohesion.”

“This is social connectedness,” explained Salinas. “Put another way, it’s how well people in the community know and support each other. We found the greater the social cohesion, the higher the perceived safety among youth. Several studies have indicated that perceived school and neighborhood safety is associated with lower crime rates and is an important indicator of juvenile and community violence exposure. We have found that social cohesion, particularly neighborhood social cohesion, is a protective factor against violence. And not just for juveniles, but for everyone overall. That’s because the more a community knows each other, the more likely they are to trust each other, intervene and help each other.”

Other protective factors include having a supportive adult at home or school and neighborhood walkability (for example, perceiving that is safe to walk at night in a neighborhood).

Salinas and others at the Harrell Center are also involved in mining information from another large sample-size database, this one involving the 2016/2017 National Survey of Children’s Health (NSCH), a project directed by the Health Resources and Services Administration’s Maternal and Child Health Bureau, which is funded by the federal government.

“We’re looking, specifically, at how adverse childhood experiences are connected to bullying, which is really just another expression of juvenile violence,” commented Salinas. “Our first analysis of the data shows that children who are victims of bullying are at increased odds of reporting adverse childhood experiences.”

A possible area of future Harrell Center research, says Salinas, is taking that same NSCH data and examining what role mental health—specifically depression—plays in bullying victimization and perpetration. This new project, which will apply structural equation modeling and mediation analysis, is currently being developed by Dr. Salinas, Dr. Nicholas Thomas (a Harrell Center postdoctoral fellow), Dr. Russell Kirby, Dr. Ronee Wilson, and a group of doctoral and master students.

“There are some studies that show children who are bullied are more likely to develop depression in the future,” added Salinas. “And there are other studies that show that children who are depressed are more likely to be victims of bullying. But why? Does one’s mental health affect how one copes? We’re interested in finding out how depression and bullying interact and whether one influences the other.”

Story by Donna Campisano, USF College of Public Health

The post COPH visiting professor studies factors influencing youth violence appeared first on College of Public Health News.

May is a month of endings and beginnings on college campuses.

This May, in addition to graduating 242 undergraduate, graduate and doctoral students, the USF COPH said goodbye to two longtime, distinguished professors: Drs. Martha Coulter and Kathleen O’Rourke.

Drs. Martha Coulter (left) and Kathleen O’Rourke at their retirement send-off. (Photo by Anna Mayor)

Coulter, a professor of community and family health, has dedicated her career to improving the lives of families and children.

The Louisiana native received her BA in sociology from Louisiana State, MSW from Tulane University, MPH from the University of California at Berkeley and DrPH from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She came to the COPH in 1986, when the college was just two years old, and was named director of the Harrell Center in 1997. She’s also held visiting professorships at the University of California at San Diego and the University of Bergen in Bergen, Norway.

“Marti [Martha] is a fierce advocate for women and families and victims of domestic violence,” said Dr. Donna Petersen, dean of the COPH. “She is a partner with the legal agencies, courts and services that exist to support families in this community. She gives of herself unceasingly and without seeking any recognition whatsoever. She is one of the humblest people I know and has been an incredible force in this college since its infancy. She is a scholar, advocate and champion.”

Coulter—who has served the COPH for nearly a third of a century as a teacher, researcher and mentor—says the highlight of her time at the college was doing research and teaching that “really focused on practice. The Harrell Center, in particular, was an intermediary between research and practice. I am so grateful for it and its ability to let me do more of the research I wanted to do.”

In addition to advocacy, the Harrell Center conducts and translates research on families and violence, shaping it into usable information for practitioners, policy makers, government agencies and community leaders.

Unlike a lot of new retirees, Coulter doesn’t have any grandiose plans for the future. “I decided I don’t want to make any big plans until the end of the summer,” she said. “I want to give myself time to relax and visit family and then to sit and really think about my next step.”
Regardless of what that next step is, Coulter, who is now a professor emeritus, knows she’s not completely done with USF yet.

“I love interacting with the wonderful students, faculty and community. Hopefully I’ll still be able to do some of that.”

Drs. Coulter and O’Rourke delight in opening gifts and reading cards from COPH staff at their joint retirement party. (Photo by Anna Mayor)

Retiring on the same day as Coulter was Kathleen O’Rourke, chair for the last five years of epidemiology and biostatistics in the COPH.

O’Rourke, who grew up outside of Boston, received her BA, MPH and PhD from the University of Massachusetts.

One of the hallmarks of O’Rourke’s distinguished career has been selfless service. She has been a registered nurse, an intern with the CDC, a Fulbright scholar in Guatemala and a public health consultant before landing in academia. She has taught at the University of Texas and the Medical University of South Carolina before settling at USF in 2004.

O’Rourke’s work at USF has had a decidedly maternal and child health focus.

She joined USF as an associate professor and research director of the Chiles Center. In her time at the COPH she’s studied—among other things—the reproductive outcomes of those with post-traumatic stress disorder, immigrant reproductive health issues and cost-effective ways to monitor environmental chemicals in breast milk.

An animal lover (she has two standard poodles that she keeps around for “comic relief,” she says), O’Rourke has also had leadership roles in some innovative programs, including a partnership between the COPH and Lowry Park Zoo that enables veterinarians to learn public health assessments and apply them to the animal population.

“Kathleen has been a tremendous contributor to public health through her scholarship, her passion for teaching and leadership and through the care that she brings to everything she does,” said Petersen. “She led, almost single-handedly, the development of our online MPH program in epidemiology, still the only one in the country. And she embraced the bachelor’s program, creating some of the most powerful courses for our undergraduates.”

O’Rourke’s immediate plans for retirement include spending more time with her family, which includes her long-time partner, Dan, as well as her four grown children and two (soon to be three) grandchildren.

She also looks forward to gardening, quilting and unpacking. O’Rourke recently moved from the Tampa area to Titusville, on Florida’s Space Coast. “I’m from Massachusetts. I believe oceans should have waves, so I wanted to be closer to where the waves are,” she laughed. “And Tampa is a busy place. I am more of a small-town person.”

What’s next for O’Rourke after the plants have been potted, the packing paper has been tossed and the grandchildren have been sufficiently spoiled is anyone’s guess.

“I plan on volunteering and using some of my public health skills,” she said. “I know I will surely miss the students and, really, everyone at the college. Donna has been a phenomenal dean and the COPH is an amazing place. But I think the first thing I should do is figure out how to retire before I start adding all these activities. I might like retirement so much, I won’t do anything,” she joked.

Story by Donna Campisano, USF College of Public Health

The post After nearly 50 years of combined service, two longtime COPH professors retire appeared first on College of Public Health News.

The USF College of Public Health’s postdoctoral enhancement component of the five-year Maternal and Child Health (MCH) Training Grant welcomes two new postdoctoral scholars in 2018, Dr. Taylor Livingston from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Dr. Nicholas Thomas from Tulane University.

Their COPH appointments began in January and continues through 2020. During their time in the program, the scholars will create a leadership plan, teach courses, participate in faculty committees and MCH seminar workshops and pursue their individual research interests.

Dr. Martha Coulter, principal investigator for the grant, and Dr. Karen Liller, co-director of the postdoctoral enhancement component, will complete monthly assessments with the scholars to discuss how they are doing in the program, track their goals and help them plan for the future.  Both Coulter and Liller are professors of community and family health at the COPH.

Drs. Karen Liller and Martha Coulter (Photos courtesy of the USF COPH).

“I think it is important to have postdoctoral scholars because there is this period of time in between being a doctoral student and  being a faculty member where it’s really helpful to have this transition,” Coulter said. “It allows them to not only to have the time to get more solid publications, presentations and experience in teaching, but to also be able to develop their own sense of academic leadership.”

The program was modeled after the USF Graduate School’s Doctoral Student Leadership Institute created by Liller during her tenure as dean and associate vice president for research and innovation.

The scholars will also track their goals, grants and publications received throughout the program in a database created by Dr. Abraham Salinas-Miranda, research faculty and visiting research scholar in community and family health.

“We’re going to continue updating the database even after the scholars leave. Yearly, we will send them an update asking about their grants, publications, career trajectory, committees they are serving on, leadership activities, if they are mentoring and more,” Liller said. “We want to follow them throughout their careers.”

Coulter said that both of the two previous scholars, Dr. Ellen Schafer and Dr. Takudzwa Sayi, appreciated the program’s approach which helped them prepare in a more holistic way to become faculty members in the future. Schafer is presently an assistant professor at Boise State University and Sayi is the principal investigator on a Grand Challenges Exploration grant funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

“Our postdoctoral program is unusual because normally these programs focus mainly on research. For our program we not only focus on research, but also teaching and mentoring skills,” Liller said. “We really want to create the next generation of leaders in maternal and child health. So far we believe it has been a success!”

Both Coulter and Liller are excited to see Schafer and Sayi start a new journey in their careers and look forward to seeing how their two new scholars embrace the program.

Story by Caitlin Keough, USF College of Public Health

The post COPH welcomes two MCH postdoctoral scholars appeared first on College of Public Health News.

Twelve undergraduate students from various colleges across USF have been accepted into a Maternal and Child Health (MCH) Pipeline Training Program, known as MCH Train-A-Bull, at the USF College of Public Health’s Department of Community and Family Health (CFH).

The two-year program provides mentorship, training and guidance for underrepresented undergraduate students from economically, educationally disadvantaged, and diverse backgrounds.

Funded by the Maternal and Child Health Bureau within the Health Resources and Services Administration, the program aims to increase the diversity of the MCH workforce by supporting scholars who seek graduate training in MCH and health-related fields.

Awardees of the training program receive academic, financial and other assistance.

The program is pleased to welcome the following 2017-2018 MCH Train-A-Bull scholarship recipients:  Eduardo Acosta-Clas, Kristina Bienasz, Vanesa Carreno, Katherine Garcia, Beatriz Godoy-Rivas, Katherine King, Markayla Leggett, Ercilia Moncayo, Yasmin Moya, Heather Nguyen, Laura Perkins, and Sarah Suhood.

2017-2018 MCH Train-A-Bull scholarship recipients and Dr. Cheryl Vamos. (Photo by Charlotte Noble)

The grant, led by principal investigator Dr. Cheryl Vamos, is one of only six such programs across the U.S.

The grant is also supported by co-investigators Drs. Anna Armstrong, Martha Coulter, Ellen Daley from CFH and Dr. Roneé Wilson from the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, program coordinator Charlotte Noble, program staff, and other MCH and health faculty and community partners.

“We are so fortunate to have this new undergraduate training award as an additional component in the MCH educational continuum that we offer at USF, which now includes undergraduate students, graduate students, post-doctoral scholars and health professionals in the workforce” said Vamos. “This further solidifies USF COPH as an important MCH training hub for the state of Florida. These efforts will contribute to our goal of cultivating a passionate, culturally competent workforce that has the knowledge and skills to address the persistent MCH health disparities both locally and globally.”

MCH Train-A-Bull Scholars at program orientation. (Photo by Charlotte Noble)

To learn more about applying to become an Undergraduate MCH Train-A-Bull scholar, please contact Charlotte Noble, program coordinator, at cnoble@health.usf.edu.

Story by Charlotte Noble, USF College of Public Health

The post MCH Train-A-Bull program welcomes inaugural cohort of undergrad scholars appeared first on College of Public Health News.