HJBR Nov/Dec 2020

HEALTHCARE JOURNAL OF BATON ROUGE I  NOV / DEC 2020 9 Dianne Hartley, Editor What attracted you to the field of public health and then to Tulane in particular? Dean Thomas A. LaVeist, PhD I was working in social work in NewYork back in the 1980s with homeless people. In the 1980s, espe- cially in New York, we had crack cocaine, a serious problem with homelessness and HIV (at the time, we were calling it GRID), a new disease that just came out. So, if you’re working with homeless people, then you’re working with HIV and working with crack cocaine, because it’s the same population. After doing that for a while, coming to work every morning with a list of people that needed housing, I’d spend the day trying to get people shelter. Sometimes I succeeded; sometimes I didn’t. Everyday there was another list, whether I got everyone placed or not. And I wanted to know, why is there always a list? What was going on? What’s producing this? I got the idea that maybe if I went off and got a PhD in sociology and went into policy that I’d understand what was the driver and maybe how I could make a difference. I went to graduate school to get a PhD, and that’s where I discovered public health. I hadn’t really heard much about this field— didn’t know anything about it. And I dis- covered when I was in graduate school that there were big differences in health status by race. That just fascinated me. Why would African-Americans have the worst health profile in the country? It just didn’t make any sense to me. I became fascinated by the question and wanted to understand the reasons. I thought that is what I would do after getting my PhD—a fellowship in public health to learn about these racial disparities in health and why they existed, to address my curiosity about it. Then, I would be able to go back to being a sociology professor working on policy. When I got in the school of public health, I learned that public health didn’t know why these disparities existed. And not only did they not know why, there weren’t that many people working on the problem. I decided then that I would devote my career to trying to understand that prob- lem—what do we do about this racial dis- parity issue? I’ve been doing that work ever since. Why Tulane? I was extremely fortu- nate back in 2018 to have several great job opportunities, including what I thought was my dream job, which was to be dean at my alma mater, University of Michigan, where I went to graduate school and did my pub- lic health training. That opportunity came up at the same time the Tulane opportunity came up. Looking at my options, under- standing the importance of NewOrleans to the country, understanding the importance of New Orleans to African-Americans, the magnitude of the racial disparities problem here in the South, I just thought that I would be able to have a bigger impact here than I could anywhere else. We’re the epicenter for racial disparities in the country, and if you want to address that problem, this is the place that’s got it in spades. What I saw in NewOrleans, in Louisiana in general, was a state that’s rural and urban and suburban with geographic disparity between rural versus urban populations and also racial disparities—a place with a lot of potential, a lot of resources and a desire to improve. I decided that this was a better place for me to be. Editor Has the COVID-19 pandemic affected enrollment at Tulane’s School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, and has it changed the curriculum? LaVeist The COVID-19 pandemic has affected enrollment. We’ve seen a substan- tial increase in our enrollment. I think part of it is that everyone knows what the epide- miologist is now, so we don’t have to explain that anymore. It doesn’t have anything to do with skin or insects or anything. It’s not ety- mology. People get it now and understand the work that we do. I worked on this in a meeting with other public health deans, and it was interest- ing. We were comparing notes, and about Thomas LaVeist, PhD, came to be dean and Weatherhead presidential chair in Health Equity at Tulane School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine from the Milken Institute of Public Health at GeorgeWashington University, where he was the chair of the department of Health Policy and Management. He also spent 25 years at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, where he was theWilliamC. and Nancy F. Richardson professor in Health Policy and the founding director of the Hopkins Center for Health Disparities Solutions. LaVeist holds a doctorate in medical sociology from the University of Michigan and is an elected member of the prestigious National Academy of Medicine among many other accomplishments. LaVeist is a leading researcher on the topic of health disparities and the social determinants of health, including areas such as U.S. health and social policy, the role of race in health research, social factors contributing tomortality, longevity and life expectancy, and the utilization of health services in the United States. Dean LaVeist has been a fervent voice in national media, calling attention to the severe health disparities suffered by minority communities brought to light by the COVID-19 pandemic and was named as a co-chair of the Louisiana COVID-19 Health Equity Task Force by Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards.