A 'Public' Mission

This job is a bit easier in the press offices of HMS' Longwood campus neighbor, the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH). Dealing with issues like drinking, smoking and diet, HSPH research leaps much easier into headlines.

The HSPH Office of Communications is a much smaller operation than its counterpart at HMS, with only four employees, but it is a more central part of the school's mission. The office usually issues four to five press releases a month.

Part of any successful HSPH research is that the public finds out about it. So a larger part of the mission of the HSPH, as defined by Dean Barry R. Bloom, is carried out by the Office of Communications.

Accordingly, HSPH sends out about same number of press releases as HMS, despite having one-ninth the faculty.

"We have to let a lot of people know about [findings made here] to change public health," said Robin C. Herman, director of communications at HSPH. "It doesn't work just to have doctors or scientist know."

Instead of focusing on the specifics of how cancer spreads or AIDS affects the body, HSPH research looks at medicine across population, determining which groups are more susceptible to different problems.

And so HSPH's news releases often deal directly with ways in which people can stay healthy--far easier for the average newspaper reader to understand than the growth of T cells in mice.