Bernadette Boden-Albala, MD, MPH, DrPH, has spent her career on the frontier of public health, from eradicating polio alongside UNICEF to building UCI’s Joe C. Wen School of Population & Public Health from scratch. Her list of field victories is long. But when she thinks about where public health has let people down, she doesn’t point to science. She points to people.
“Our biggest challenges are around how to deal with movements that are anti-science, anti-evidence, not understanding the scientific process, and really not being able to adequately translate results of evidence-based studies out into communities so the communities understand that we do evaluate evidence and that this is the evidence that we really need to work with,” Dr. Boden-Albala said on a recent episode of the “Becker’s Healthcare Podcast.”
Public health has produced strong evidence and weak translators. The field has struggled to reach communities in terms they trust and recognize, creating an opening for misinformation. Dr. Boden-Albala sees that gap not as a political problem but as a training failure and her school is designed to address it.
“Communication, communication, communication about the science that we do” is what she tells students at the Wen School, which she founded after arriving at the University of California Irvine in 2019. The school now enrolls roughly 1,500 undergraduates, several hundred master of public health students and more than 100 doctoral candidates. From day one, Dr. Boden-Albala built communication into the curriculum as a core competency.
The benchmark she set is deliberately informal.
“I want every student here to be able to defend climate change, because climate change and health are critically important and are associated, but to defend climate change at the Thanksgiving table,” she said. “Our students have to be able to defend the science that they are trying to move forward. That’s one thing we’re doing and we’re doing a lot of great work with having them feel comfortable being able to do that. Our students need to be able to get in and use large data to help us. We’ve amassed so much data in the world around public health; now we have to be able to use that data and optimize it so we can get it out there.”
The approach reflects a broader conviction that public health’s credibility crisis is self-inflicted, at least in part. Scientists have historically designed interventions in offices, then pushed them into communities rather than building with communities from the start. Dr. Boden-Albala is trying to close that loop. Students at Wen are trained to work directly with community partners, asking what will actually work rather than assuming they know.
“We’re talking about working on preventive care with our communities, not just sitting in our office designing things that we think will work, but really getting out there listening to and talking with all different communities and saying, ‘Do you think that this is going to work? What do you think? This is what we need to do. How can we do this together?'” Dr. Boden-Albala said.
The recent hantavirus outbreak was a case in point. Dr. Boden-Albala called it unsurprising, a predictable consequence of a global surveillance system she said has been “kneecapped,” but argued the tools to contain it already exist. What’s missing is the institutional will and public trust to use them.
“I’m saddened when I hear about hantavirus because I think we could be doing better. We have the technology. We have AI, for example. AI should help us together with people to really deal with issues like hantavirus and to absolutely stop it dead in its tracks to prevent it,” she said. “But our system obviously is broken.”
The broader enrollment trend offers a counterintuitive reason for optimism: more students are applying to study public health than ever before, even as the field faces headwinds from federal funding cuts and political hostility.
“Even though we are in a terrible time for public health in this country right now, more students than ever are applying to do public health,” she said. “That’s just incredibly heartwarming to me.”
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