We would like to welcome Dr. Alan Card as a new faculty member in Global Health, Management and Policy Assistant Professor.
“My origin story begins with a dusty corner in the largest used bookstore I’d ever seen,” Dr. Card recounted, “where I first ran across The Hot Zone by Richard Preston and then The Coming Plague by Laurie Garret. I had never heard of public health before that, and I was immediately hooked.” This inspiration led to pursuing an MPH in Global Communicable Disease where he did his capstone project on pandemic preparedness. After receiving his MPH, Dr. Card wanted to work in the field and worked as a Health Policy Analyst, writing what became successful proposals for his company’s internal research and development program. “I was very excited about the idea of getting to work on the problems that were most exciting to me,” Dr. Card described. However, he began to teach part time for an MPH program which he enjoyed and then found a PhD program specializing in Healthcare Design Group/Engineering Design. As he progressed through the program, Dr. Card realized “it felt natural to aim for a faculty position that would combine those research and teaching interests.”
“We often talk about the dichotomy between public health and healthcare,” Dr. Card explained, “but a lot of my research focuses on improving public health within healthcare” Through his experiences in working as a professor in the School of Medicine, he gained a lot of knowledge focused on patient and healthcare worker safety and it helped him see “what the healthcare looks like from the physicians’ point of view and the constraints they face when trying to make things better.” In the life of a professor everyday is different, but one day he taught a course to pediatric hospital medical fellows to enhance the importance of observational study design. As an example of how his work helps to implement public health perspectives in clinical care, he is currently most excited about the TRANS-SAFE Patient Safety Learning Laboratory grant. Working with a great team of partners affiliated with UCSD, Cedars Sinai, and the University of Wisconsin, this innovative project is working to help improve psychosocial patient safety amongst the transgender and nonbinary community. “I hope [this project] will serve as a template for efforts to improve patient safety for other minoritized or stigmatized populations,” Dr. Card stated.
When asked if he has a dream project, “I have too many!” Dr. Card responded. “And I’m really excited to explore opportunities to collaborate with people across the SDSU community,” he elaborated, “which will only add to the list.”
