After the year-long Winter of COVID, I hope that my colleagues are enjoying the Summer of Vaccination! To those of you I have yet to meet in person, I look forward to getting to know you in the course of a much more normal fall semester, with opportunities to sit for coffee to talk about life, work, and plans for the future.

It has been profoundly strange to arrive at Brown in the midst of a pandemic. I have received the warmest welcome, yet remain uncertain whether many of my colleagues exist from the waist down.

My experience at Brown—the warmth and collaborative spirit, the drive to experiment, push the envelope, and reach beyond the walls of the university, even in the midst of the pandemic—was epitomized by the collaboration that came together around the Pandemic Problem Solving course that ran in February and March.

The course drew together a truly stellar team from across Brown. Shankar Prasad, Deputy Provost and Vice President for Strategic Initiatives, reached out to me with an idea to find a way to share what has been learned about the coronavirus pandemic with a broader audience. I loved this idea, but was also concerned whether we could do this well. After all, at that point I’d only been at Brown for a couple of months, and was still getting my bearings and in the early stages of building my team. Even with the best team in the world, the course presented unique challenges - we envisioned an experience that is usually best done in-person. The goal here was to create a short program that helped high-level, super-busy people learn and share actionable skills and forge an effective connection. It was unclear how we might do this in the online environment.

The subject matter of the course also presented unique challenges. I’m accustomed to teaching from data. The pandemic had produced reams of data, much of it ambiguous, leaving key questions unsettled—how much do kids get infected, or transmit the virus? Why has the virus devastated some communities while having much less impact in others? How would we teach about a virus that is quite literally evolving during the course?

My first move was to ask Dr Megan Ranney—who had just agreed to join me at the School of Public Health as an Associate Dean—to join me as co-instructor. Megan has been a steady and authoritative guiding voice since the earliest days of the pandemic, when she worked tirelessly to make protective equipment available to healthcare practitioners facing the first, terrifying wave of the virus. She also brought a broader lens to thinking about the pandemic, drawing on her important leadership around substance use disorder, gun violence, and other public health crises. With Megan on board, I felt the course had the intellectual heft it needed to succeed. But how would we stand up an entirely new course in six weeks, without even being able to gather around a whiteboard?

Fortunately, Shankar had a plan. With his help, we put together an all-star Brown team bringing together Sandra Smith, from the School of Professional Studies, Betsy Stubblefield Loucks from Brown Technology Innovations, and Naomi Pariseault, an instructional designer from the Sheridan Center. Together with Stefanie Friedhoff, Senior Director of Content & Strategy at the School of Public Health, and Andrew Iliff, the Dean’s Senior Writer, this team executed on the vision for the course in record time, developing innovative online tools to allow course participants to share experiences and collaborate in an online course.

The course had its first meeting in February, bringing together an unusually diverse group of participants drawn from divergent professional backgrounds, from a federal judge to a construction executive. One doctor regularly joined the class from the call room in scrubs. This was also an experiment—typically executive education courses bring together leaders from similar industries facing similar challenges, but our hypothesis was that the pandemic presented such an unprecedented, society-wide disruption that it was really important for leaders in different sectors to learn from each others’ experiences to find solutions to the pandemic problems they faced.

To identify these solutions, Megan and I spoke twice a week to people leading the pandemic response—including New York City’s Health Commissioner Dave Chokshi, who spoke about the city’s efforts to control the pandemic by microtargeting neighborhoods and communities, to Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan who discussed the political landscape that made decision-making difficult, to Dr Uché Blackstock, who discussed the devastating and disproportionate impact of the pandemic on communities of color.

Crucially, after every plenary session, participants in the course broke into small working groups, facilitated by an incredibly talented and skilled group of Brown graduate students. Megan and I rotated through these breakout groups, and got to see them at work, and it was truly inspiring. Wise beyond their years, these facilitators fielded challenging questions, managed complex interpersonal dynamics, and—most of all—brought all of themselves to bear to help course participants apply tools from the plenary sessions to their work and their lives.

The course ended in March, but we are already exploring how to leverage the materials and insights developed for a broader audience through the development of an asynchronous course. With vaccines now widely available, it sometimes feels that the end of the pandemic is in sight in the United States, but the virus continues to spread around the world all but unchecked as vaccines roll out much more slowly beyond our borders. An asynchronous course would be accessible to a people around the globe, and would seek to bolster public health and industry leaders in countries such as India, where the virus is likely to threaten society for many months to come.

This Pandemic Problem Solving course taught me several things. First, it was a reminder of the value of a “rapid response” approach to new challenges and the role that universities have in moments of crisis. Public health—and academia more broadly—is known for moving cautiously, waiting for the evidence base to develop, and teaching from established practice. For good reasons! But particularly in a crisis, sharing insights and preliminary data is immensely important, helping people in schools, public health departments and businesses make better decisions. Second, Brown is truly an extraordinary place. The spirit of collaboration and trust, as well as the expertise and excellence, that allowed us to pull together a course in about the time that it took to teach it was a revelation to me. It reminded me that Brown is a place that, in the darkest of moments, has the people and spirit to be a light. And that's what the course was - a light for so many people struggling to solve problems in the middle of a pandemic. If this is what we can do under such difficult circumstances, I cannot wait to see what we will accomplish, working together on the challenges to come.