The New College of Health Sciences Dean Shares His Vision

Patrick Vivier became dean of the URI College of Health Sciences (CHS) in January 2024. He brings leadership and faculty experience from Brown University and Tufts University, along with years of experience as a practicing pediatrician. The URI Foundation & Alumni Engagement sat down with Dean Vivier to hear about his vision for the college and public health in Rhode Island.

Q: How does your experience as a pediatrician translate over to what you’re doing now as dean of the College of Health Sciences?

A: In a number of ways. One of them is what you understand as a pediatrician, or in most health fields, is that most of the major issues facing our world today, whether that’s Rhode Island, the United States, or the entire world, are not something one discipline can solve. As a pediatrician I knew that—you need nurses, pharmacists, specialists, and therapists—a whole team. You can’t meet the needs of the child without that.

So what I was excited about when joining the College of Health Sciences was this breadth of disciplines: you have psychology, human development and family science, physical therapy, nutrition, communication, kinesiology, public health, clinical neuroscience, and gerontology, this whole range that, if we’re going to try and make a difference in health outcomes, we can flourish when they work together. And at this time where there’s also new deans for nursing and pharmacy means we can really think of exciting ways URI can address issues in our state and beyond.

Q: How do you envision working with those deans in nursing and pharmacy? What areas of collaboration have you found so far?

A: One thing is that we all understand the same thing: that if we’re going to move the needle on health, we need to be doing it together. Here’s one example. We’ve just launched the Department of Public Health in CHS, and the new undergraduate degree in public health being launched this fall, and planning a new masters in public health (MPH) program the following fall. So right away nursing and pharmacy are interested in this, either as dual degrees for their students or courses for them. So right from the get-go there are working groups in each of those colleges to see how we make those things attuned to the needs of nurses and pharmacists.

And it’s not just those three colleges—we’re working with arts and sciences and other colleges. There’s health communications in public health, and a range of other things where, university-wide, we can ask: “how do we work together to improve the health of communities here in Rhode Island and throughout the world?”

Q: These new public health programs sound interesting. What do they look like right now?

A: For the MPH program, we’re hoping that it has several core courses everyone is expected to experience; concentration courses where we start to tailor what’s important for different sub-disciplines, and then elective courses. And we want it to be available broadly. So it’ll be available online so people in the workforce or other parts of the country can complete it. Or some mix of online and in person. We also want dual degrees, so that for example undergraduates can complete the program as a 4+1 model. Communications might want to do it. Nursing, certainly. You can also have pharmacy doing it as a dual degree. We want to set it up to be as accessible as possible. It can also be that, in those electives, students might take advantage of things from other colleges.

My own work focuses on mapping and geographic systems, and we have resources related to that at URI, but in the other colleges. The business school has things that will intersect with health care management. So it’s exciting how there’ll be a lot of ways spanning across the University to take advantage of many disciplines to address health issues. We saw in COVID that we need to be able to do better, and some of that is making sure there are folks in the public health workforce from a broad range of disciplines, and that there are people in other disciplines who have public health training.

Q: To zoom out a little bit, why would you say it’s important for people to think about public health today? What’s the key to thinking about this in the post-COVID world?

A: So it wasn’t that long ago that you needed to make the case for what public health is. Before COVID there were these campaigns where officials would put signs reading “this is public health” on water treatment plants and on the sidewalk to get people to understand what public health encompasses. I don’t think people ask that question so much anymore. It was not that long ago that no freshman would come to college saying they wanted to do public health, but now across the country many do. A lot of us lost people, right, in our families or our neighborhoods to COVID? Or we got sick ourselves. On top of that people’s jobs changed, their school changed. So how a health issue can change the world—I think we all get that now.

I think we also now understand that public health decisions are not just, “Do I give this vaccination or not? Do I take this medicine or not?” You know, physician-y kinds of things. But [they are]: Do you wear a mask or not? Do kids go to school, or do you do home learning? When do you come back? There are business questions, engineering questions, basic science questions. And again, for me, if we want to keep doing better in the future, people in medicine or nursing or public health need broader training. And our politicians and lawyers and judges and business leaders and school leaders—they need some training in public health, so that when we make these decisions, we really bring all this knowledge to bear from all of these disciplines.

Q: It seems that, because COVID touched everything, we needed to respond to it on every front.

A: Yes, and we know that now because of COVID. But if you look at other health issues that have already happened—let’s take injuries. The number one killer of children after year one. If you look at where we’ve been successful, we haven’t come up with an “injury vaccine,” and we’ve done a little better with treatment and ICUs and EMS, but really what changed the situation was better engineered cars, better airbags, better engineered roads, laws about wearing seatbelts, educational programs, etc. It’s just much more obvious now to the whole population.

My own work has been working on vaccine delivery—one of the major successes of public health has required scientists working to develop the vaccines; politicians making laws about ensuring kids get shots before they go to school. We have all of these avenues where we can make a difference, and that’s why it’s exciting to work in a health field. When I teach child health, one of the things I always ask is, “Does anyone know someone who’s had smallpox?” And the answer is obviously no, because it hasn’t existed in the lifetime of anyone I’m teaching. Polio? Pretty rare that any 18- to 20-year-old knows anyone who’s been actively infected during their lifetimes. I ask, “Do you know congenital rubella syndrome?” And kids don’t know necessarily, whereas someone my age has seen people with congenital rubella syndrome, or siblings or friends had it. So you can have that kind of dramatic impact, but it takes a broad range of fields to really maximize health.

Q: That brings me back to thinking about your qualifications. It’s rare for someone in your position to hold both an M.D. and a Ph.D. Can you tell me a little more about that—how did you decide to do that in the first place? What was that experience like for you?

A: It’s been hugely important, and I spend a lot of time talking to students about the distinction between being a clinician and a public health researcher. Being a clinician gives you a one-on-one experience, and you see people in difficult moments of their lives, and you can try to make a difference for that individual. And it is a privilege to be able to do that. But one of the frustrations is that many of the reasons a child would be in my office for that condition are things happening outside of my office that I can’t fix. If I was only a clinician, and I couldn’t work on the issues that were bringing those children to me in the first place, I think that would have been frustrating.

So, one of the beautiful things about doing public health, which my Ph.D. is in, is that you get to try and make a difference for populations. If your research helps influence state lead poisoning policies—there are a lot of kids I’ve never even met who are going to be helped by that. Over the course of my career, to have both of those experiences has been wonderful. Students really ought to think about what excites them most and let that guide them, whether that’s one or the other or some mix of both. And for me, I was a better clinician because of my public health knowledge, and a better public health person having had clinical experience.

Q: Let’s turn back to CHS. What do you find most exciting about the college? What are the most promising opportunities as you look forward in your position as dean?

A: The first thing is: interdisciplinarity here is exciting. We have kinesiology, physical therapy—how the body works. Human development and family science and psychology—how the mind works. We have nutrition and its consequences for health, communication disorders in both hearing and speech. And public health, which to me is sort of this umbrella. The interdisciplinary neurosciences program is located in the college. And we have the Center for Gerontology as well. So we get psychologists and nutritionists looking at eating behavior and how that works. Or we get physical therapy working with engineers outside of the college.

We have excellent educational programs and wonderful teachers, and a long history of that. We have incredible students and so many alums in Rhode Island, it’s amazing. We’re also really building research, and a wave of junior faculty doing amazing things in research, including interdisciplinary research where they’re using cutting-edge technology both in basic science contexts and out in the community. In the community, we operate two child development centers based out of the college. One is here on campus and one is in Providence. We have counseling clinics and psychology clinics. We have hearing and speech clinics. We have SNAP education, to help people eat better. We have programs in the prisons to address nutrition there. So, we’re making a difference in the community, not just through education and research, but through direct provision of services. That, to me, is exciting. We’re not a place where we never leave our labs or our offices. We’re not satisfied with that. As a college, we’re making that difference.

Q: What are some of the college’s funding priorities in the next couple of years?

A: We simply can’t do the things I’ve been talking about without resources. We just can’t. We need a bit of everything. For example, with undergraduates, you can think about study abroad, how it’s life-changing to do that. We want to make that accessible to all students.

When we talk about the philosophy of learning by doing—in the MPH program students will have to do an internship out in the community—we want to have the funding so that students can follow their passions and choose options in underfunded areas instead of having to pick an option just because it’s paid. Some of our biggest areas of need are in graduate education, where we don’t have the scholarships and fellowships to attract and maximize the experience of those students. We’d love to see endowed faculty positions that allow faculty to take chances in their research. Our research program needs more funding, so we can get equipment and personnel that lets us be on the cutting edge. Mini-grants and startup costs for faculty, so we can expand the scope of our world-class research.

And we want to be out in the community, too. Recently, I had a meeting with Jonnycake, an incredible organization in the Kingston community that has a food pantry, that has a housing program, that has after-school programs for people living in poverty. I would love to have funding that would, for example, let three students over the summer do a needs assessment, or faculty members doing interviews out in the community to support this important work.

Q: Is there anything you’d like alumni, friends, and supporters of URI to know beyond what we’ve talked about?

A: If we go back to the first question you asked me, about being a pediatrician and how it informs me being the dean of the college—I answered that you can’t do it by yourself and that you need others. That can be a very painful lesson for a pediatrician. There are some limits to what you can do, but there’s joy in seeing what you can do when you team up. You can say the same thing about philanthropy. There are things I can bring to the table, but there are lots of things I can’t. Donors can bring critical resources. In my experience, donors can also bring experience from their fields and their success in their professional careers to offer advice. So when you’re a pediatrician and you have a sick child, if you need a specialist, or you need a child life person, or you need donors who get you a great children’s hospital, you come to understand your own limits, as well as the gratitude you have when others chip in.

If we’re going to have URI make the impact on our students, on research, and on the next health issues that change the world, if we’re going to make a difference in our communities, we need donors, and we need them to be engaged—with their resources, with their energy. As excited as I am about everything we have in the college, we can’t do it just in the college. We want to partner with others who can bring some of these other things. We welcome that opportunity for people who really want to make a difference.