At the Board of Trustees November meeting, the Academic Affairs Committee approved the establishment of a new academic department at the Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine in an attempt to make a more interdisciplinary program that can expand international health outreach and research.
According to Cummings School Dean Dr. Deborah Kochevar, the new Department of Infectious Disease and Global Health will combine parts of other departments, including the Division of Infectious Diseases (DID) from the Department of Biomedical Sciences, as well as a cluster of wildlife and conservation medicine, international veterinary medicine and public health sections from the department of Environmental and Population Health.
"The idea was that these two areas, the division and the cluster, are very synergistic," Kochevar said. "The department will facilitate enhanced interactions across departments."
The DID has been funded by the National Institutes of Health for over 25 years and has great research strength, according to Kochevar.
"When you take that great expertise and research and take this area with great research in wildlife and medicine, you create synergies that will benefit our students, the research we do in terms of understanding global health and the impact of those interfaces between humans and animals, and broaden the scope of our interface and research interactions in terms of greater global reach," she said.
Associate Professor of Environmental and Population Health Dr. FlorinaTseng acknowledged that there are many infectious diseases emerging worldwide that can be transmitted from animals to people and she hopes the new department will enhance research in this area.
"My vision is that we continue to really strengthen the different areas of the school that will be in the new department that are already well-known parts of the school [and to] further collaboration across different areas of the school to promote global health," she said. "I certainly hope that we're going to be able to see at least one or two fairly robust programs that Tufts is involved in globally that really address all the different aspects of human, animal and ecosystem health on an international basis and that that will hopefully involve students as well as faculty."Although Kochevar has high expectations for the new department, Tseng said that staff members are still working on the logistics of its creation.
"Because this is a new department a lot of what we're doing right now is just trying to lay the groundwork for things like curricular responsibilities, trying to figure out staffing needs and even drafting a mission statement for the new departmental website," Tseng said.
Tseng said she and Associate Professor of Biomedical Sciences Dr. Patrick Skelly will be the associate chairs of the new department which will be led by Saul Tzipori, the director of DID. While this will be the fourth department at the Cummings School, staffing levels will remain relatively unchanged, according to Kochevar.
"We had two faculty positions that were open for different reasons, so both of those positions will be filled as part of the new department," she said. "We will divide faculty and staff accordingly and the minimum expense that will occur will come with sorting out administration details."
Kochevar said that the school was also the recipient of a five-year, $20 million RESPOND grant from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), which is currently in its fourth year. Additional faculty in the department will be funded by the grant.
While Kochevar hopes the new department will increase collaboration, she said there will not be many immediately visible differences to students at the school.
According to Tseng, course offerings will remain the same for the time being, although some will migrate into the new department.
"As we continue to work together more, hopefully we'll be able to look at the curriculum more critically and think about if there are ways we can improve what we are offering and take advantage of the different people in the department," she said. "Those are some of the larger questions we will be looking at over the next few years."
