The School of Population and Public Health (SPPH) celebrated the grand opening of its new building at 2206 East Mall last Friday. The move from the James Mather building to the renovated space in the former Library Processing Centre brings the school under the same roof as the Centre for Health Services and Policy Research, the School of Environmental Health, the Human Early Learning Partnership, Population Data BC, the Global Health Research Program, and the Centre for Population Health Promotion Research – all affiliates of SPPH.
UBC President Stephen Toope, SPPH director Martin Schechter, and Faculty of Medicine Vice-Dean Ross MacGillivray kicked off the event with speeches and a ribbon-cutting ceremony. Prof. Toope reflected back to the vision of UBC’s founding President Frank Fairchild Wesbrook—a pioneer in public health teaching and research and then president of the American Public Health Association. In a 1905 speech, Wesbrook called for coordinated specialism in public health research—eight years before he was called upon to build the University of British Columbia.
“We’re celebrating today another form of coordinated specialism—the success of bringing together almost unprecedented levels of coordination to bear in the advancement of population and public health, not just for the people of Canada but for all of humankind,” Prof. Toope said. “Wesbrook was a prescient thinker but I doubt that even he could have envisioned the diversity of expertise that would one day be standing in this room wanting to collaborate across specializations, wanting to break down disciplinary boundaries to the extent that teachers, researchers and students will do within these walls and beyond.”
For more from the SPPH grand opening event, visit http://www.spph.ubc.ca/.