
The Gillings School's Public Health Leadership Program is home to Master of Public Health concentrations in Leadership in Practice, Population Health for Clinicians and Place-Based Health. We also co-lead the Global Health concentration and graduate-level online certificates. We work to prepare public health practitioners for leadership positions by developing population-level knowledge and skills with an interdisciplinary emphasis. Building upon their varied professional experience, students collaboratively learn to assess community health needs, develop innovative policies and programs and ensure that new systems are maintained and improved.
Coronavirus Affects Everyone: The Public Health Leadership Program Responds
Pooja Jani, MD, MPH, graduated from the UNC in 2016 after completing her preventive medicine residency training at the School of Medicine and her Master of Public Health in the Public Health Leadership Program’s health care and prevention track. Soon after, she joined the New York City Department of Health & Mental Hygiene (NYC DOHMH).
In January 2020, Jani was activated under DOHMH's Incident Command System to support emergency response efforts for COVID-19 in New York City (NYC). During the containment phase of the response, she served as a citywide health emergency field operations medical specialist, where she helped DOHMH to stand up a quarantine operation in collaboration with Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to monitor potentially exposed individuals who were returning to John F. Kennedy airport on flights from Hubei, China.

STATEMENT ABOUT HANNAH-JONES TENURE CASE
The Public Health Leadership program expresses its support for the open letter sent to all faculty by the Chair of the Faculty, Dr. Mimi Chapman, and the challenge by the Student Body President, Lamar Richards, for all to speak on behalf of our students, faculty and staff. We represent an academic program that does not have tenured faculty, but believe strongly in academic freedom for all faculty on campus. We believe that the right of all faculty to pursue their intellectual interests should be safeguarded irrespective of their tenure status, and that the UNC Board of Trustees’ actions in Ms. Hannah-Jones’ tenure review are undermining the ability of all faculty to speak their mind through their research and teaching. We urge the Board of Trustees to heed the call across campus and act promptly to approve the appointment with tenure of Ms. Hannah-Jones.