September 29, 2016 | Erin Bluvas, bluvase@sc.edu
Plans are underway for the University of South Carolina’s Arnold School of Public Health to open a satellite campus in Greenville, focusing on research and public health degree programs.
The campus, near the University of South Carolina School of Medicine Greenville, will expand the Arnold School’s presence in the Upstate by offering graduate-level public health education that combines clinical medicine, research and health sciences data.
The Arnold School’s new campus will expand the school’s presence while growing an emerging segment of graduate-level preparation for public health practice that is increasing in demand -- an integrative approach that maximizes public health impact by generating synergies between clinical medicine and data-driven population health sciences.
The satellite campus will start by teaching classes in existing Arnold School graduate degree programs such as the Master of Public Health in Health Promotion, Education and Behavior and in Health Services Policy Management. Later expansion is expected to include highly interdisciplinary graduate degree options that combine population health sciences with clinical medicine, nursing, pharmacy and other health-related disciplines.
The satellite campus is expected to have strong collaborative teaching and research relationships with the School of Medicine as well as research collaborations with Clemson University and Furman University.
The expansion is a reflection of the Arnold School’s growth as the state’s most comprehensive public health program and only accredited public health school. The Arnold School will recruit and hire five full-time faculty members, with a goal of 10 new faculty members by 2019. Faculty will teach courses and investigate solutions for health challenges. Students will benefit from participating in research as well as learning from case studies during their programs of study. Additionally, the new faculty members will be fully integrated into the larger Arnold School departments located on the USC-Columbia campus, and students from both campuses will be able to attend courses from either campus using distributed learning technologies as needed.
“Bringing and hiring new faculty to Greenville who are experts in community-based research and practice in behavioral sciences, epidemiology/biostatistics and health systems management will create exciting new opportunities for everyone involved,” said Thomas Chandler, dean of the Arnold School of Public Health.