Cutler said that the School of Public Health’s mission is to train people who will be involved in improving the health of the world.

“They view undergraduates as one of the ways of doing that,” said Cutler. “I don’t think they perceive themselves as being conflicted in any way.”

FOCUS WITHOUT A CONCENTRATION

Harvard first offered a secondary field in health policy in 2007, but in 2010, the secondary field expanded its scope to become the joint global health and health policy secondary that students know today.

“We bring a lot of intellectual excitement to this area,” said Cutler, faculty chair of the secondary field. “It’s such an important and popular field that the student numbers are very high, and you just have to be prepared for a lot of interest.”

According to Cutler, global health and health policy is one of the largest secondary fields. This year, there are roughly 100 GHHP students in the Class of 2012.

Cutler said that the University must work to create better opportunities for students to study topics in global health and health policy, regardless of whether they simply want to take one course on the topic, follow a program of study by taking several courses on the topic, or pursue international and domestic experiences related to public health policy.

Despite the large interest in the GHHP secondary, Cutler insists that there have not been discussions about promoting the secondary to a concentration.

Cutler said GHHP will focus on expanding the range of its classes rather than on developing into a concentration.

BECOMING ONE UNIVERSITY

As the program continues to flourish, some faculty members believe that even more can be done to support undergraduate interest. The major challenge in developing the teaching efforts on the undergraduate and graduate campuses lies in the funding of faculty salaries.

Though the number of faculty teaching global health courses has increased and the research opportunities available to undergraduates both on campus and overseas have increased, the funding for HSPH faculty to teach undergraduates may not be enough of an incentive to foster a stronger cross-school relationship between the College and HSPH.

“Diverting time from their own personal research to teach undergraduates is a much bigger statement than just to say they’re good guys and some of them want to teach undergraduates,” said Bloom. “I think it’s a big trade-off.”

Still, Duggan points to an improvement in funding over the past few years. “There used to be zero, but now I think there’s a moderate amount of salary support for faculty teaching.”

Duggan said that beyond the funding issue, the physical separation of the campuses—with the central FAS campus located in Cambridge and HSPH campus in Longwood—will keep students on the medical or public health track at a disadvantage. However, students can still look to the University’s other graduate schools, such as the Business School or Divinity School, for other kinds of global research.

“They may not be doing global health research, but they’re doing all kinds of global efforts in their fields, some of which are very relevant to public health,” he said.

As the University looks to increase collaboration between schools, the increased role of HSPH in the College marks a possible area for continued cooperation.

“With the tremendous interest on the part of undergraduates, particularly in global health, we take that as a mission and obligation,” Bloom said.

—Staff writer Cynthia W. Shih can be reached at cshih@college.harvard.edu.