Speaker 1: At any stage in your professional career, a master's in public health with a concentration in disaster management can teach you how to prevent and manage public health problems and threats on a local and global scale. Students pursuing this degree gain the critical skills necessary to protect their communities from natural, accidental, and intentional disasters, including those which disproportionately affect the most vulnerable populations.

Speaker 2: So the Department of Environmental Health Sciences is kind of the foundational piece to what might be exposure sciences, as it relates to any kind of hazardous conditions in the environment, whether that's a chemical exposure or even just a disaster like a hurricane. We look at the exposures there and we look at how to try to mitigate the risk against it. How to understand the mechanism of injury going on with it and how to reduce the adverse

Speaker 1: outcome. Dr. Stephen Murphy is a veteran of numerous major disasters. He's developed and managed preparedness plans and operational responses for environmental threats such as the COVID-19 pandemic, the Ebola epidemic, H1N1, hurricanes, and coastal oil spills.

Speaker 2: Our program tries to leverage those lessons learned from the research, from the practice space, kind of leveraging those in addition to the 15 core capabilities produced by the CDC for public health preparedness, integrating that further into DHS and the National Preparedness Goal, the five core mission areas there with protection, prevention, mitigation, response, and recovery. And we try to create a well-balanced, multidisciplinary curriculum that allows the students to better position themselves upon graduation for entry into the preparedness space.

Speaker 3: Hey, Dr. Johnny. Good to talk to you, Stephen.

Speaker 2: How do you feel this degree has helped you get to where you are in any kind of future career trajectory? Do you feel like it's established you as a professional or do you feel like it's helped to accelerate your career in any way?

Speaker 3: All crises have a public health and medical component to it. And so whether we're responding to an act of terrorism, whether we're preparing for a hurricane, there's always that public health and medical component. And so in order to better understand and respond and plan and strategically manage these sorts of crises, it's important to have a background such that the MPH or the doctoral degree programs that Tulane offers you.

Speaker 2: As you've entered this emergency preparedness space, a lot of what we focus on is some of the vulnerable populations and how some of the adverse impacts of all these disasters drive and kind of exacerbate some underlying conditions. Can you speak a little bit to how you're viewing that and how this public health degree has helped you understand some of those vulnerabilities?

Speaker 4: Getting my master's in public health with a concentration in disaster management was probably the best package deal that anybody hiring is ever going to get. For COVID, you know, in order for me to interpret the statistics, I needed to understand how the epidemiology works in the communities. Disaster management is one thing, but understanding underserved communities, understanding barriers to access, health equity, health equality, all of those make me a better disaster manager.

Speaker 2: You know, the curriculum positions our students trying to get their traction and get some experience in an actual, almost chaotic situation and trying to give them some sort of sense of how an operational response may look, but also trying to frame some of the protocols to help them understand how to best position themselves before that crisis occurs. Can you talk a little bit about how something like that can help accelerate a student's success upon graduation?

Speaker 3: Academic degrees are great, but coupled experience is even more powerful. And one way to look at it is the degree is the key to the keyhole, but it's the experience that gets you through the door. These programs allow you to gain both, right? You go through an academic curriculum, but at the same time, through both the practicum experience that the MPH includes, and a lot of the hands-on experiences through the coursework, whether it's visiting an emergency operations center, it's field visits to other sorts of disaster management coordination cells or disaster management offices to learn hands-on from practitioners, put together, it gives you a real life hands-on experience.

Speaker 1: The School of Public Health often uses immersive scenarios and environmental science to develop strategies to address disasters.

Speaker 2: Some of our curriculum is really active and really application-based. And so we try to introduce the students and leverage all of the research and the practice-based lessons learned that we experienced over time and ongoing with what we learn on a daily basis, especially in a COVID-19 pandemic. We take them to the city's emergency operations center, where prior to the visit, the students are grouped together and they create their own protocols as if they would operate during a crisis event. And they have repeatedly commented on how it's better positioned them upon graduation to enter the job space and hit the ground running.