To the public health class of 2026

As a new cohort of public health professionals start their careers, some thoughts on the aspirations that guide our work.

We are in the midst of graduation season, which I have long considered to be the happiest time of the year. It is a joy to gather with graduates, family, and friends and wish the next generation of public health professionals well—as I had the privilege of doing last week at the Andrew M. and Jane M. Bursky School of Public Health at Washington University in St. Louis, where I serve as dean. The commitment of these graduates to the work of public health, and to the values that support this work, is a source of hope indeed, as much a sign of renewal as the flowers that accompany this time of year.

Graduation season is also a time when I find myself reflecting on the first principles, the aspirations that guide our mission, a mission this year’s public health graduates have now made their own. It is worth reflecting on these aspirations as a reminder of why we do what we do, and, on a perhaps deeper level, of the power of aspirations to endure through a range of historical moments, outlasting, and even changing for the better, times of challenge. It is important to recognize that public health, at its most essential, is a series of aspirations. An aspiration is simply something we are reaching towards, whether that is an idea, a manner of conducting ourselves, or a set of policies. This reaching is what helps us clear the distance between the world as it is and the world as it should be. Sometimes, the simple act of expressing our aspirations can help lay the groundwork for a better world, by setting a marker for future progress. This is perhaps most true in difficult moments, like the one public health is arguably now in, when it can be easier to see challenges than opportunities and when the distance between the world as it is and the world as it should be seems far indeed.

So, I would like to share some thoughts about the aspirations of public health in this moment. In keeping with the season, I will address these remarks to the public health graduates of 2026, with excitement for all they have achieved and for all they will do next.

I will start with a story.

It is a story drawn from the history of the United States. I tell it not as a celebration of one nation over others, but because this particular moment in this particular history teaches a lesson that belongs to all of us. The lesson I want to draw out is one that travels. It is about what it means to hold fast to an ideal, even—and especially—when the country which has committed to that ideal is going through a hard time. Every country worth caring about has such moments. And every country worth caring about is, in the end, defined less by those moments than by what its people continue to aspire to through them.

With that in mind, here is the story.

This July 4th, the United States will celebrate its 250th birthday. It is significant that we date the country’s birth not from the British surrender at Yorktown, not from the ratification of the Constitution, not from the convening of the first Congress, nor from the swearing-in of the first president, but from the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. We do this because America is an idea—an idea first expressed through the eloquence of Thomas Jefferson (with a famous edit from Benjamin Franklin):

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

On the eve of war with Britain, a single sentence affirming the self-evident equality of all may have seemed like a minor detail—a throwaway in what was fundamentally an airing of grievances against King George III, and the likely death warrant of all who signed it. Yet these words, more than any others, have shaped what America became, and what it is still becoming.

This was recognized by no less than Abraham Lincoln, who wrote:

“All honor to Jefferson—to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.”

This is one of my favorite quotations. And what makes it travel—what makes it a quotation for all of us, wherever we are from—is what Lincoln saw in Jefferson’s words, and what he wanted us to see. Even in the concrete pressure of difficult moments, what endures is what we aspire to. The aspiration is the thing. It is the abstract truth, embalmed in the document, that becomes the rebuke and the stumbling-block to whatever forces would diminish us. And this is truer when times are hard. When the world feels turbulent—when there is much, in any country, that we would wish were otherwise—it becomes more important, not less, to be clear about what we aspire to. The aspiration is what carries us through. It is what makes a country, and a profession, worth committing a life to.

What we aspire to in public health

Which brings me to what we aspire to in public health, in this moment. I would suggest we lean into four aspirations.

First, we aspire to be a community of excellent scholars dedicated to the science. This is our foundation. It means working out the first principles of what we believe and then gathering around us people who are animated by the call of science and scholarship—people willing to follow the facts wherever they lead, grounded in humility, in reason, and in a steadfast commitment to truth. This means ensuring that public health is, and remains, a community of innovative, intellectually curious, heterodox thinkers who take the science seriously because the stakes—people’s lives, people’s health—are serious.

Second, we aspire to train the next generation, so that the work continues always. No single individual finishes this work. None of us, however gifted, however hardworking, gets to see all of it through to its end. The only way the work endures is by being handed on—from teachers to students, from one generation to the next, with care, with rigor, with the conviction that those who come after will go further than we ever could. That is, in a real sense, is what graduation is about. You, the graduating class of 2026, are the handing on. You are the proof that the work continues. And one day, sooner than you think, you will be the ones doing the handing on yourselves.

Third, we aspire to elevate, encourage, and lean into science across disciplines and sectors. Public health is not, and has never been, a solitary discipline. The questions we care about—why people live the lives they live, why some are healthy and others are not, what it would take to change that—do not respect the boundaries of any single field. They sit at the intersections: of biology and economics, of medicine and policy, of climate and food and housing and law. This calls for the building of partnerships. The Beatles had it right: we get by with a little help from our friends. Public health has many friends, and it can have more—across disciplines, across sectors, across the lines that too often keep good ideas from finding each other. There is a saying: if you want to go fast, go alone, but if you want to go far, go together. When we lean into science wherever it lives, and forge partnerships wherever they are useful, we can go far indeed.

And fourth, we aspire to do all of this with an unwavering eye to impact and consequence. The science matters because it changes things. The teaching matters because it changes people. The collaborations matter because they change what is possible. We are in public health because we are idealists—motivated by a radical vision of a healthier world. But getting to that world takes pragmatic, incremental steps. Sometimes it takes a step back for every two steps forward. Sometimes it takes choices that seem, in the moment, frustratingly minor. It is in such moments that we might recall the Butterfly Effect—the idea that small events can ripple across time and space to shape large outcomes. The butterfly flapped its wings in 1776 and blew into being a national story with global implications. Everything we do has the potential to matter. So, we should act as if everything we do does matter—because, in the end, the only public health worth doing is one that bends, however slightly, the arc of history toward health.

These are our aspirations. This is why we do what we do. Because the world is not yet as healthy as it could be, because it is on us to help make it so. Thank you to all who are engaged in this work, particularly the public health class of 2026. You are graduating in an uncertain moment, but there is no uncertainty about your capacity to meet challenges and make a difference. Thank you for all you have done, all you will do, for our collective health.

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Also this week

We are delighted to announce a transformative partnership between the Bursky family and WashU, to create the Andrew M. and Jane M. Bursky School of Public Health. This investment will help shape a new public health for this dynamic global moment. We are deeply grateful to Andy and Jane Bursky for their vote of confidence in the future of public health at WashU.

For the Ideas Matter podcast, I spoke with Professor Lizhi (Liz) Liu, of Georgetown University about the booming political economy surrounding e-commerce in China.