Stony Brook University Program in Public Health

Welcome to the Program in Public Health at Stony Brook Medicine!

Dynamic Academic Programs 

The Program in Public Health (PPH) trains people to integrate the knowledge, skills, and values of public health and health management into their careers and provide leadership in their field. The PPH offers a variety of degree programs including:

• Master of Public Health (MPH) (accredited by the Council on Education for Public Health)
• Master of Health Administration (MHA)
• PhD in Population Health and Clinical Outcomes Research
• Advanced Graduate Certificate in Health Communications
• Advanced Graduate Certificate in Health Education and Promotion
• Combined and concurrent degree programs:
• Master of Business Administration/MPH
• Master of Social Work/MPH
• MPH/Master of Science in Nutrition
• MPH/Master of Arts in Public Policy
• Medical Doctorate/MPH
• Doctorate of Dental Surgery/MPH

Strong Foundations in Public Health 

Public health is distinct from medicine in both its emphasis on prevention and its focus on populations. One of the hallmarks of our program is that we create a learning environment that emphasizes a collaborative, multidisciplinary approach to the root causes of public health problems, while instilling the skills necessary to develop innovative and practical solutions for positive impact. Changing political, economic, and social conditions in the United States and the world make the application of new knowledge and technologies all the more important. In addition to the traditional knowledge, including epidemiology and biostatistics, our graduates leave with:

• an ecological understanding of the determinants of health – from genetics and behavioral all the way up to environmental and policy factors;
• a systems approach to solving health problems;
• an emphasis on proactively stabilizing and improving health among all populations;
• a thorough understanding and appreciation of the cultural heterogeneity of populations;
• an insistence on accountability, evidence-based practice, and continuous performance improvement;
• an understanding of the medical, dental, and public health systems that address health - including organization, financing, regulation, quality, & effectiveness;
• skills to develop comprehensive health information systems;
• tools to assess, develop, implement, and evaluate policy options;
• the conceptual and analytical tools to prioritize problems and make sound decisions.

Exceptional Faculty and Scholarship 

One of the many strengths of our program is our exceptional faculty who are public health scholars in clinical, social and behavioral sciences, and the humanities. The PPH faculty are committed to excellence as teachers and mentors, and many are also leading exciting programs of research, which they translate into the student experience in the classroom, laboratory, clinic or in service to other spheres of public health practice. Current areas of research include racial disparities in healthcare access; sleep health; cognitive functioning and aging; environmental epidemiology; resilience and adaptation in the context of disability and illness.

A Growing Impact on Long Island and Beyond 

Our program attracts a competitive pool of outstanding students with diverse backgrounds, unified by a shared passion to improve quality of life locally and globally. Many of our students either work as practitioners in related fields or are in training concurrently, integrating an ecological understanding of health into careers in medicine, dentistry, business, nursing, social work and beyond. The PPH staff work closely to connect students to a growing network of alumni who are public health practitioners. Our alumni network serves as a valuable resource for student field placements and employment. Our students have earned competitive practicum placements and have gone on to obtain full-time employment offers at State and County Departments of Health, non-profit organizations such as IPRO and VIBS (Victims Information Bureau of Suffolk), and university medical centers such as NYU, Stony Brook, and Mt. Sinai.