The University of Washington School of Public Health (UW SPH) is pleased to announce faculty taking on new leadership appointments starting in the 2024-2025 academic year. These leadership roles support our shared work of solving the greatest public health challenges and co-creating health equity with communities in our region and the world.
An asterisk denotes that the appointment is pending approval from the University of Washington Board of Regents
Elizabeth Kirk | Associate Dean, School of Public Health
Elizabeth Kirk has been named associate dean for education at UW SPH. For the last two years, Kirk has served as the interim associate dean, providing vision and oversight for educational activities across the School. Her responsibilities include overseeing curricular issues and academic programs, developing and implementing professional development training related to pedagogy for new and current faculty, overseeing School-level accreditation, and supporting individual units seeking specialized accreditation. She also serves as the primary liaison for UW SPH to campus and to ASPPH for matters related to academic programs and curriculum. Kirk is a teaching professor in the Department of Epidemiology and in Food Systems, Nutrition, and Health and served as chair of the SPH Curriculum and Educational Policy Committee for AY20/21 and AY21/22 and associate director of Food Systems, Nutrition, and Health (previously known as the Nutritional Sciences Program) from 2017 to 2022.
Lianne Sheppard | Interim Chair of the Department of Environmental & Occupational Health Sciences*
Lianne Sheppard is the interim chair at the UW Department of Environmental & Occupational Health Sciences (DEOHS), Rohm & Haas Endowed Professor in Public Health Sciences at DEOHS and professor in the UW Department of Biostatistics. In 2021, Sheppard was named to the Rohm & Haas Endowed Professorship, which supports faculty with expertise in the health impacts of chemical exposures. Her current research portfolio includes several studies of air pollution exposures and their neurotoxicant effects. She has a Ph.D. in biostatistics.
Heidi van Rooyen | Chair of the Department of Global Health
Heidi van Rooyen joined the Department of Global Health as professor in July 2024, and will begin her tenure as chair of the department on Oct.1, 2024. Van Rooyen is an internationally recognized executive leader, social scientist and clinical psychologist from the Global South. For the last three decades she has led, with distinction, multi-disciplinary teams to deliver impactful bio-behavioral-social research on COVID, HIV and AIDS, health and sexual and reproductive rights through a mix of public health, health systems, implementation science, intervention and policy research.