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Northern Illinois University

NIU Office of Public Affairs


News Release

Contact: Jim Ciesla, NIU School of Allied Health Professions
(815) 753-3409

May 26, 2004

NIU degree in public health
earns national recognition

DeKalb — Northern Illinois University’s B.S. program in public health was chosen as a model program by the Association of Schools of Public Health’s Task Force on Undergraduate Education.

Along with similar programs at Brown University, the University of Southern California and Temple University, NIU’s program has been invited to be a formal member of the task force.

“I think being chosen for the ASPH task force is tacit recognition of the standing of our program” said Jim Ciesla, associate professor and coordinator of the program in the School of Allied Health Professions, part of the NIU College of Health and Human Sciences.

“There are many forces at play that have put public health in the national spotlight. First and foremost is the concern over bioterrorism and the realization that the infrastructure our country needs to deal with that threat – the public health infrastructure – is sorely lacking,” Ciesla added. Also, “the SARS and West Nile Virus epidemics and the discovery of Mad Cow Disease in the United States have played a major role in bringing the importance of public health into the national consciousness.”

As a result, the education of the public health workforce has received a great deal of national attention in the past year, highlighted by the Institute of Medicine’s influential report: “Who will keep the Public Healthy? Educating Public Health Professionals for the 21st century.”

The IOM report underscored the importance of undergraduate public health education, so the ASPH formed the task force on undergraduate education. After a year of preliminary work, the task force invited NIU and others to participate in the process of making education in public health more accessible to undergraduates in colleges and universities across the nation.

“The task force is a direct response to the IOM report,” Ciesla said. “The importance of undergraduate public health programs has been largely overlooked. Most people associate professional education in public health as something that occurs at the graduate level.”

NIU has an accredited master’s program, but the B.S. program is older and produces many more graduates – graduates who have been making an important contribution to the delivery of public health services in the northern region of Illinois and beyond.

Dr. Richard Riegelman, the chair of the task force, said NIU’s program is one of the “largest and most complex in the nation” in terms of number of students enrolled and depth and breadth of the educational offerings.

Ciesla represented the program at the task force’s May meeting in Chicago, and feels that being selected as formal members of the task force “speaks volumes about the perceived quality of the program. Of course, there is a lot more to public health than bioterrorism and these highly publicized epidemics,” he said, “but if they draw interest to the field, so much the better.”

Public health is an excellent major for students who wish to work directly with the community, and is becoming a major of choice for those who pursue medicine, dentistry, veterinary medicine, law and other fields that require graduate and professional education.

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