Learning from Anywhere for Everyone: Inclusion in a Digital World

Amy Lauren Fairchild is a historian who works at the intersection of history, public health ethics, and public health policy and politics. Her work helped establish public health ethics—which is concerned with the well-being of populations—as fundamentally distinct from either bioethics or human rights. Whether exploring the tension between privacy and surveillance, immigration and border control, or paternalism and liberty, Fairchild assesses the social, political, and ethical factors that shape not only the potential and limits of the state to intervene for the common good but also what counts as evidence.

Fairchild has written two books: Science at the Borders: Immigrant Medical Inspection and the Shaping of the Modern Industrial Labor Force and Searching Eyes: Privacy, the State, and Disease Surveillance in America (with Ronald Bayer and James Colgrove). In addition, she has published in leading journals including the New England Journal of Medicine, Health Affairs, the American Journal of Public Health, Science, and the JAMA. The National Endowment for the Humanities funds her current book project: a social history of fear and panic.

A graduate of the Plan II Honors Program at the University of Texas at Austin, Fairchild received her MPH and PhD from Columbia University. She was on the faculty at Columbia for 22 years in the Department of Sociomedical Sciences at the Mailman School of Public Health. At Columbia, she served as Assistant Director for Academic Affairs in the Center for the History and Ethics of Public Health, Chair of the Department of Sociomedical Sciences, and Director of the Foundations module and Integration of Science and Practice in the MPH Core Curriculum. She continues to serve as Co-Director, with Ronald Bayer, of the World Health Organization Collaborating Center for Bioethics at Columbia’s Center for the History and Ethics of Public Health. Fairchild also served on the faculty at Texas A&M University. There, she was Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at the School of Public Health and Associate Vice President for Faculty and Academic Affairs at the Health Science Center.

Fairchild feels extraordinarily honored to serve as Dean of the College of Public Health at The Ohio State University. Any university with the chutzpah to have a poison nut for a mascot is the kind of place she wants to stay.

Dr. McNatt has extensive experience in public health emergency preparedness, epidemiology, program planning and social and behavioral health at both the academic and practice level. Her research interests are in rural health, multicultural issues, social media as a health education tool, and Native American health disparities. She is currently on the Government Advisory Council, Border Health Initiative and Health Equity Council of NRHA. She has served as the President of the American Heart Association’s Hispanic Outreach Tarrant County Task Force, and is actively involved in multiple grant funded research projects. She has been teaching online since 2007, and has completed and obtained her online teaching certificate from Sloan-C, COI from LERN, and was a member of the ASPPH Innovations in Pedagogy Workgoup. She has taken courses from Quality Matters and is working towards getting her program QM certified. Dr. McNatt holds a DrPH, from the University of North Texas Health Science Center and an MPH from Texas A&M School of Rural Public Health. Her BA is in Biology from Texas A&M University. She currently resides in Texas with her family and enjoys riding horses and traveling (when we are not in a pandemic).

Dr. Shan Mohammed is a Clinical Professor in the Bouvé College of Health Sciences at Northeastern University.  He is the founding director of the Master of Public Health Program in Urban Health and from 2007-2017 oversaw the program in areas of educational policy development, curricular design, public health workforce development and recruitment/outreach to public health professionals. He has served as Director of Interprofessional Research, Education and Practice Initiatives in the College of Health Sciences and as a Lead Scholar with the Center for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning Through Research (CATLR).

He currently serves as the Chair of the Education Advisory Committee with the Association of Schools and Programs in Public Health (ASPPH) and oversees 4 national working groups on the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning.  He is a member of the ASPPH Steering Committee for Framing the Future 2.0 Initiative and the ASPPH Task Force on Zero Tolerance for Discrimination, Harassment and Racism in Public Health.

In addition, he is a lead site-visitor with the Council on Accreditation for Public Health. Dr​. Mohammed has also served as Faculty-in-Residence for over five years, living in a residence hall with 1,100 undergraduate students where he designs and implements programming to assist students achieve academic success and cultivate their personal and professional development. 

Dr. Laura Magaña joined the Association of Schools and Programs of Public Health (ASPPH) as President and CEO in August 2017. Under Dr. Magaña’s leadership, ASPPH has continued to advance its mission to strengthen the capacity of members by advancing leadership, excellence, and collaboration for academic public health. During her tenure, ASPPH has significantly grown its global engagement, launched the academic public health leadership institute, and enhanced the voice of academic public health through advocacy efforts.

Prior to joining ASPPH, Dr. Magaña dedicated more than 35 years to successfully leading the transformation and advancements of public and private universities in Mexico; educational organizations in the USA; United Nations programs; and NGO’s in Central America and Europe. She was most recently the dean of the School of Public Health in Mexico at the ASPPH-member National Institute of Public Health (INSP). Her diverse portfolio features academic publications, educational technological developments many of which relate to learning environments, the use of technology in education, and public health education. She has also been a faculty member and lecturer in diverse universities around the world.