In July, US Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy issued a landmark advisory declaring firearm violence a national public health crisis. The advisory builds on decades of work from Dr. Megan Ranney and other researchers who advocate taking a public health approach to reducing firearm violence. She joined us at Aspen Ideas: Health to discuss what this means: namely moving from a focus on law and order to centering harm reduction and prevention. Now, as the Dean of the Yale School of Public Health, Megan is applying the same systems thinking approach to focus on the big changes we need to drive health in the US.

We discuss:

• What it means to be a great public health communicator
• How public health approaches were used to dramatically reduce automobile deaths over the last 50 years, and how the same strategies should be used now to tackle firearm deaths
• Her take on bridging the gap between medical care and public health

Megan says this is the moment for public health reinvention:

“This is a moment where we get to reinvent how we study, teach, and most of all, practice public health, not just locally, but also globally, as we come out of the COVID pandemic, and I think there's a real moral clarity, but also a moral imperative for us, as public health professionals, to seize this moment, to take this kind of pivot point that we're at as a field, and to move it forward in a direction that we will be proud of.”

Relevant Links

Megan Ranney testimony on gun violence as a public health issue

Gun violence panel at Aspen Ideas: Health

Surgeon General advisory on firearm violence

Yale Q&A with Dean Megan Ranney

Common health coalition

Bipartisan Safer Communities Act

UC Berkeley School of Public Health course on urban gun violence prevention

More on Rahimi case

About Our Guest

Dr. Megan L. Ranney is an emergency physician, researcher, and national advocate for innovative approaches to public health. In July 2023, she joined Yale University as Dean of the Yale School of Public Health, where she is also the C.-E. A. Winslow Professor of Public Health. Her research focuses on developing, testing, and disseminating digital health interventions to prevent violence and related behavioral health problems, and on COVID-related risk reduction. She has held multiple national leadership roles, including as co-founder of...