Michael Peddecord: a founding faculty’s career with the School of Public Health
In 1981, San Diego State University assembled the first set of faculty for the newly established School of Public Health (SPH). Among those faculty members was Michael Peddecord, a microbiologist turned researcher who had just recently begun his teaching career in Chicago.
45 years later, Peddecord is still engaged with the SPH as a donor and guest speaker. However, the SPH looks much different since Peddecord joined, back when the goal was simply to get the first cohort of students to graduation.
“The first group of students, like a first-born child, were special, because they would set the standard for other classes,” Peddecord said. “They were also experimental subjects, ‘guinea pigs’ of sorts, since they were test cases for new faculty and new classes.”
With limited resources, Peddecord and the other founding faculty were relied upon to fulfill these new classes, some of which were beyond their expertise.
“As founding faculty, we had to cover a lot of topics for all the new classes,” he said. “I was a generalist, so sometimes I got tasked with courses out of my comfort zone including biostatistics.”
Peddecord remembers then director Douglas Scutchfield’s words of encouragement to stay just “one week ahead of the students” with course planning and preparation.
Nevertheless, Peddecord stuck with the SPH and settled into a career in San Diego as a teacher and researcher.
He spent the early part of his career partnered with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention through the Laboratory Quality Assurance Program. There, he worked with laboratory testing experts to “monitor HIV and other testing practices, develop and pilot test quality improvement initiatives and publish results in peer reviewed publications,” he said.
He would later become co-director of the San Diego Immunization Program, which brought together SDSU, the University of California, San Diego, and the San Diego County Health Department to help immunization surveillance and promotion.
Now retired, Peddecord and his wife Mary, a retired clinical microbiologist herself, have set up scholarship funds for SDSU and other universities.
“Supporting students is our way of giving back, and in many ways, an investment in the future health of our society,” Peddecord said.
Education looks different now than it did when the Peddecords earned their degrees decades ago. Back then, financial support from the state made a college education more affordable. Now, rising costs and shrinking support have made higher education a costly financial decision. The Peddecords’ scholarship makes that decision a little easier for students.
“What gives me the greatest satisfaction is seeing how many SDSU graduates have gone on to achieve success in leadership roles across public health, healthcare systems, and research—particularly here in San Diego,” Peddecord said. “Knowing that I may have played even a small part in their development is deeply rewarding.”
Peddecord’s contributions to the SPH are still felt today. Last year, SDSU was designated a Research 1 university, signifying the university — and the SPH — as a top research school in the United States.
When the SPH was founded, it had a mandate of being a productive research program. Peddecord, at the time, was the first and only faculty to have an R01 Grant, a prestigious research grant from the National Institutes of Health that added early research prowess to the SPH.
“[The SPH] has evolved from a small, ambitious program into a mature and highly respected school,” Peddecord said. “I am proud to have been part of building a remarkable school that has helped shape the careers and lives of so many students.”
