From the Dean

Dear Friends,

Each summer, Advances allows us to tag along with our students engaged in public health fieldwork required for their degrees. This is an important student learning experience wherein they begin to apply and integrate their public health training with people's real-world public health needs. And it has truly become a global experience for many of our students. This year, students collected passport stamps in India, Mali, Tanzania, Vietnam, Kenya, Rwanda, Japan, and Switzerland. Their rich experiences are featured in our cover story that begins on page 2. We hope this will whet your appetite for more stories about students' hands-on public health experiences, whether here at home or on the far side of the world. One thing emerges from our students' experiences: despite cultural and political differences, people around the world have much in common when it comes to public health. You can read about all of this in our students' own words in their online journals, which can be found at www.sph.umn.edu.

As part of this year's field experience issue, we invited students to submit photos for use with the story and on the magazine's cover. The photos bring the words to life vividly. The cover photo comes from Amenah Babar. The M.P.H. student is in Mali, working with a team of researchers on clinical trials aimed at discovering a vaccine for malaria. This year, malaria will strike up to a half billion people. At least a million will die, most of them under age five, the vast majority living in Africa. The children pictured are from the village of Bancoumana, one of the vaccine trial sites. And they are the reason Amenah is in Africa this summer.

The message conveyed by these stories and photos is that public health is global, with all its challenges and implications. Our students know this, and that's why they are seeking ever more opportunities for global health study. This is why philanthropic support for their work has become a pressing need of ours. They want to play a real part in changing the world--we shouldn't let the price of a plane ticket stand in the way.

John R. Finnegan, Jr., Ph.D.
Dean and Professor
Assistant Vice President for Public Health