University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Public Health

The University of North Carolina’s School of Public Health focuses on health promotion and disease prevention for individuals, groups and entire populations – across North Carolina and around the world.

Academic Departments
The School boasts eight academic departments that offer baccalaureate, master’s and doctoral degrees:


 * Biostatistics
 * Environmental Sciences and Engineering
 * Epidemiology
 * Health Behavior and Health Education
 * Health Policy and Administration
 * Maternal and Child Health
 * Nutrition
 * Public Health Leadership Program

Centers and Institutes
In addition to academic departments, several centers and institutes operate within the School, providing additional contributions to public health research and practice.

The School’s primary service and outreach arm is the North Carolina Institute for Public Health. The institute extends the School's service capabilities and promotes the School's commitment to community service as its public responsibility.

The School also collaborates with many external centers and institutes specializing in health care research and practice and with other schools within and beyond UNC.

History
The School of Public Health was organized in 1936 as a division within the School of Medicine at the University of North Carolina. Separate status as a school of public health was granted in 1939, making our school the first school of public health established within a state university. The school awarded its first graduate degrees in 1940.

In 1949 UNC added the schools of Dentistry and Nursing with the schools of Public Health, Medicine and Pharmacy to formally organize the University's Division of Health Affairs. Thus, the School of Public Health became one of the few schools of public health in the nation to be co-located with four other health-profession schools on one campus.

Over the years, the School of Public Health has grown into a collection of seven different departments and a Public Health Leadership Program. The departments of Epidemiology, Environmental Sciences and Engineering, Health Policy and Administration, and Public Health Nursing (now the Public Health Leadership Program) existed when the school was founded. The department of Health Behavior and Health Education was added in 1942, Nutrition in 1946, Biostatistics in 1949, and Maternal and Child Health in 1950.

The School received a pledge of $50 million in 2007 from Dennis and Joan Gillings to fund
 * Innovation Laboratories to focus concentrated efforts on solving public health problems
 * Gillings Fellows to provide faculty members working sabbaticals in organizations around the world
 * The Gillings Prize for Public Health Impact

The School of Public Health continues to award doctoral, master's and undergraduate degrees and certificates to students who take courses on campus in Chapel Hill or via the Internet as distance learners. The University of North Carolina's School of Public Health continues to receive national recognition as the top school of public health at a public university (U.S. News & World Report, 2003).

Accredited by the Council on Education for Public Health, the School offers both undergraduate and graduate programs in traditional classrooms and through the latest distance-education technology. Its facilities include a new state-of-the-art research center and many of the other offices, classrooms, and labs are being updated and renovated.