Archive for the ‘Alumni News’ Category

The University of Minnesota has received a gift of $1 million from Master of Healthcare Administration (MHA) alum Don Wegmiller and his wife, Janet, to establish the Wegmiller Professorship in Healthcare Administration. The program is offered by the University of Minnesota School of Public Health. Wegmiller, a 1962 graduate, credits the MHA program in significantly [...]

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Analyzing statistics, measuring outcomes, and implementing process improvement plans is all in a day’s work for Rebecca Stepan (MPH ’05). Stepan is the quality improvement manager for the cardiovascular service line at University of Minnesota Physicians Heart at Fairview (UMP Heart). She designs and optimizes the plans UMP Heart follows to save costs, improve individual [...]

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“I loved walking across the Mississippi from the Law School to the School of Public Health and taking on a whole new set of challenges,” says Elizabeth Karan (aka Issie) of her years in graduate school earning an MPH in Public Health Administration and Policy and a JD through the University’s Joint Degree Program in [...]

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  Next fall, most Americans and many small business people will sit at their computers searching for the right health care insurance policy. If all goes well, they should be getting more choices in an easy-to-understand format called a health insurance exchange. “We are planning for [health insurance selection] to be a process that takes [...]

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By Andrew McCulloch (MHA ’80), president of Kaiser Permanente Northwest Central to federal health care reform is the need to innovate our systems to deliver higher quality, more affordable care. In my home state of Oregon, we are at the helm of one of the most ambitious reform efforts in the nation. It is focused [...]

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The group of Minnesota college students, all pre-health majors, climbed out of the old yellow school bus. The temperature that January afternoon in Nicaragua registered 35 degrees Celcius (95 Fahrenheit), much warmer than back home. They paired off, linked up with their interpreters, and tromped in different directions down the dirt roads of the village [...]

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MPH graduate Lizz Hutchinson is turning her talents to empowering women In her work for CARE, a leading humanitarian organization fighting global poverty, Lizz Hutchinson travels to more countries in a year than most of us do in a lifetime—Bangladesh, Ghana, India, Malawi, Mali, and Tanzania. In previous assignments, she’s been to Kenya, Mozambique, and [...]

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If public health’s mission is the greatest good for the greatest number, then helping people grow healthy food is a perfect career,” says Patricia Ohmans, MPH and Bush Foundation Fellow. Lately, the idea of working the land is drawing some SPH grads and students into farming. The founder of Health Advocates, a public health consulting [...]

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A strawberry—sun-ripened and field picked— flavored Molly Turnquist’s future. “Sweet, tart, and floral, I remember thinking,” she says. “I wanted everyone to taste how good a fresh strawberry can be.” That experience is the reason Turnquist earned a degree in dietetics and nutrition from Concordia College, Moorhead, Minn., then entered the Public Health Nutrition program [...]

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SPH education Growing up the youngest of eight children in rural Iowa, Bill Kreykes “never had any expectation” of going to college. The idea of attending lab tech school in the Twin Cities seemed a big enough leap. “My dad gave me a ride to Minneapolis and $50,” Kreykes recalls. That led to his first [...]

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