People can easily understand why a public-health class on emergency preparedness might study events like the COVID-19 pandemic, the Interstate 35-W bridge collapse, or the mass shooting at Annunciation School. Less obvious, perhaps, is why that same course would examine events like the 2018 Super Bowl in Minneapolis or the 2008 Republican National Convention in St. Paul.
“This is where the field of public health emergency preparedness has really expanded,” explained Professor Jeff Bender, one of the instructors of the School of Public Health’s Emergency Preparedness: A Public Health Perspective course. “For large events like these, we need to be prepared for all scenarios, which means anticipating risks, planning for contingencies, and coordinating across systems long before anything goes wrong.”
Co-instructor Courtney Wetternach, who was working in public health emergency preparedness at Hennepin County, actually helped lead extensive planning efforts for the 2018 Super Bowl. “We worked as a metro area and a state on identifying all of the potential public health issues that might happen,” she said. That meant preparing for everything from food safety risks—both accidental and intentional—to the possibility of a mass casualty incident.
It also meant solving logistical challenges that most people never consider, such as “thinking about how to evacuate people and shelter them when all the hotel rooms from Rochester to St. Cloud were fully booked,” Wetternach said. “What are all of our contingency plans for that?”
Charting a Course through Disasters
The field of public health emergency preparedness traces back to the aftermath of 9/11, when anthrax was anonymously sent through the U.S. mail and exposed major gaps in the nation’s preparedness. “Those events made a lot of us realize that we didn’t really have things planned out very well from a public health perspective,” Bender said. “We didn’t think about the public health scenarios or who needed to be involved.”
Wetternach said that understanding the public-health emergency preparedness field requires teasing apart roles that often get blurred together. Emergency management, she explained, tends to focus on infrastructure and logistics—responding to events like tornadoes, clearing debris, and restoring services. Public health emergency preparedness, by contrast, is centered on people. “Our role is to support those who were impacted,” she said, whether that means addressing physical injuries, coordinating care, or providing mental and disaster behavioral health support.
Public Safety as Public Health
The lessons from real-world events—integration, coordination and, when possible, advance preparation—are key themes that the instructors share with their students. The course is also designed to incorporate current events, and students recently discussed the public health role during protests and large-scale demonstrations like the immigration enforcement actions in Minnesota. “That’s something students are really pushing on,” Bender said, noting that these moments force difficult but important conversations about the intersection of public health and public safety.
The course helps prepare students for a wide range of career paths. Graduates go on to roles at healthcare organizations, local and state health departments, and federal agencies like the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, helping design and implement emergency response systems. The field is inherently interdisciplinary, and that diversity is reflected in the classroom itself. “A lot of the students in our course come with a professional degree already,” Wetternach said, noting that many are nurses, physicians, or veterinarians. For nurses in particular, she noted, emergency preparedness offers “one of the best areas of opportunity,” allowing them to bridge both clinical care and operational planning.
At a time when the threats facing communities are growing more complex—from cyberattacks that can cripple hospital systems to climate-driven disasters, gun violence, and the continued risk of infectious disease outbreaks—the need for public health emergency preparedness has never been more urgent. The field is expanding, and Wetternach and Bender are helping to equip the next generation of professionals to think across systems, anticipate the unexpected, and protect communities when it matters most.
