The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee named Magda Peck the inaugural dean of the Joseph Zilber School of Public Health last October. Construction of the school’s building in the former Pabst Brewery complex is nearing completion, and Peck recently started her duties as dean.
“I’m so excited about being here,” Peck said. “This is an extraordinarily welcoming city, and I’m very impressed with the vibrancy and can-do attitude here.”
Peck previously served as associate dean for community engagement and public health practice and professor of pediatrics and public health at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha. She is a graduate of Hahnemann University in Philadelphia, her hometown, and she holds master’s and doctoral degrees from the School of Public Health at Harvard University.
“I was recruited to the University of Nebraska and over that two-decade period I helped establish the School of Public Health,” she said. “University of Nebraska had incredible facilities with a Medical Center, School of Nursing and Allied Health, but they didn’t have a formalized education or school dedicated to improving public health.”
Peck founded the first graduate program in public health and the master’s in public health training at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, she said. The school moved into a new building and also received national accreditation under Peck’s leadership.
“That’s one of the reasons Milwaukee appealed to me,” she said. “I was able to get the chance to do that again in new ways.”
Peck has some familiarity with the City of Milwaukee through a nonprofit organization called CityMatCH, which was initiated in 1988 as a special project of the Boston Department of Health and Hospitals. At that time, Peck had just received her doctorate from the Harvard School of Public Health and was working with the Boston Health Department.
“I asked the question that if Boston was working on trying to lower the infant mortality rate, teen pregnancy rate, and violence and obesity levels in our city, what were other cities doing?,” Peck said.
In 1991, the initial idea translated into a national organization, a coalition of ideas, with the goal of improving the organization and delivery of services to urban families and children, with Peck serving as executive director.
The Milwaukee Health Department was one of the early members of CityMatCH.
“(CityMatCH) is a member organization that includes city health departments from all across the country,” Peck said. “They are all trying to address similar issues and find answers to difficult questions.
“That’s the other reason I was so excited about the opportunity to be the inaugural dean at the Zilber School of Public Health. I had been working with the city’s leaders for a while, and I was so intrigued by this city that I feel has such promise, so many assets and yet many challenges.”
Peck has spent her early time in Milwaukee getting to know the people and the neighborhoods.
“I’ve noticed that this city has incredible history,” she said. “Yes, it’s a city that has done better at times, but there is such a vibrancy and notion of pride here. I’m in total learning mode, but people are so generous and want to tell me the story of their Milwaukee. I don’t come here with all the answers, but as a leader here I come with lots of questions, and I’m humbled to be a part of the change.”
The good and the bad
Peck said she has identified pockets of greatness and pockets of trouble in Milwaukee. Her goal is to help provide the best possible opportunities to be healthy for everyone in the community.
“I don’t believe that some in our community should have different or better opportunities to be healthy,” she said. “The School of Public Health is about creating the conditions necessary such that everybody has equal chances and equal choices to be healthy and well.”
The UWM School of Public Health will occupy a 56,000-square-foot building that is under construction in the Pabst Brewery complex located on the east side of North 10th Street between Juneau Avenue and Winnebago Street. Half of the building is a restored brewery structure and the other half of it is new. The Brewery Project was started by Zilber Ltd. founder Joseph Zilber to redevelop the former brewery complex. Zilber contributed $10 million to the UWM School of Public Health project.
The new facility will include several classrooms of varying sizes, an open commons area as well as office space for faculty in all areas of public health. In addition, there will be research space for graduate students and research faculty as well as the administrative offices of the school and a dedicated area for City of Milwaukee Health Department employees who will be permanently based there.
The location of the UWM School of Public Health is key, Peck said.
“I’m thrilled that the school is not only being constructed in close proximity to the neighborhoods where the research is needed the most, it is also being built in a business complex, in close proximity to our partners and neighbors in the downtown area,” Peck said. “The school should not only be about issues of poverty and health disparity. At the same time we’re helping to eliminate the unconscionable deaths of babies before their first birthday, we are also charged with building and encouraging a healthy workforce and being an economic driver for the downtown region.”
Partnerships
Peck plans to make sure the school contributes just as much to the downtown business community and economy as it does to promote wellness and prevention in the areas hardest hit by disparity.
The school has already formed partnerships with the Milwaukee Health Department, community organizations, state health agencies, Aurora Health Care and other higher education facilities. The wet lab science portions of the school will remain on the traditional UWM campus on the city’s East Side.
The School of Public Health will do research seeking solutions to the biggest health problems facing Milwaukee today, Peck said.
“We’ll be conducting a lot of research on the tough questions facing our community, teen pregnancy, obesity, access to quality care and violence in our neighborhoods and trying to collectively answer what we can do differently or better so we’ll thrive,” Peck said.
Peck expects the Zilber School of Public Health to be a next generation school; a school that adds to the already existing assets the campus has.
“We have an incredible opportunity to bring the science of prevention and a lens of fairness and equality to the next generation of community leaders already on this campus,” she said.
According to Peck, the new School of Public Health is charged with taking prevention science and applying it to the problems in Milwaukee’s urban neighborhoods.
“This includes obesity, making sure children have safe places to play and walk to school, that adults have safe places for recreation and fitness, and how the employer community can promote health and wellness and healthy choices,” she said.
Peck plans to have the UWM School of Public Health become an accredited institution, much like the University of Nebraska’s School of Public Health.
“We want to make sure that the research and education that we provide is of the highest caliber,” she said.
The school established its first Ph.D. program in the fall of 2009, started offering undergraduate classes in fall of 2010 and launched a masters of public health program in 2011. Classes will move to the new facility in the Pabst Brewery complex this fall.
