WashU Bursky Public Health recently earned accreditation from the Council on Education for Public Health (CEPH), validating the academic foundation the school has built since its January 2025 launch.
The accreditation, awarded for an initial five-year term through Dec. 31, 2031, came after a three-day site visit and months of review. CEPH, the only agency recognized by the U.S. Department of Education to accredit public health schools and programs, concluded that the school met all 36 accreditation criteria.
“Achieving full compliance with all 36 accreditation criteria is a fitting way to begin a new school,” said Sandro Galea, MD, DrPH, the Margaret C. Ryan Dean, Eugene S. and Constance Kahn Distinguished Professor in Public Health and vice provost for interdisciplinary initiatives.
“I’m enormously grateful to everyone who led this effort and to the entire community that is building this school every day. This accreditation strengthens our ability to prepare future public health leaders and generate the research needed to improve health around the world,” he added.
The achievement represents more than two years of behind-the-scenes work to establish the new school’s educational and institutional framework while demonstrating compliance with CEPH’s national standards for public health education.
The nearly 200-page self-study and more than 1,000 supporting documents were a massive undertaking — but the greater challenge was updating them as the school continued to evolve. During this same time period, leaders recruited approximately 150 primary and secondary faculty members, created key offices, planned the school’s major research networks and welcomed an inaugural class. Every change to the new school had to be incorporated in the documentation.
The review examined all aspects of the school, including curriculum and student learning outcomes, governance, finances, technology, physical space, research, faculty resources and community engagement. Led by the school’s Office of Education, the accreditation effort drew on expertise from across the school and university.
An evolving institution
For Liz Vestal, director of continuous improvement in Bursky Public Health, the four months between submitting the preliminary accreditation self-study in June 2025 and the final version in October became a period of constant revision. Vestal described the process as keeping the accreditation materials “in lockstep with the changes as they were happening.”
“I think a lot of accreditation teams at established schools spend that period dotting their i’s and crossing their t’s,” Vestal said. “But for us, our fundamental policies changed. Even our mission, vision, value statements — we didn’t have those fully formed yet.”
Faculty and staff members gathered during an August 2025 retreat to help refine the school’s mission, vision and values — one example of the collaborative decisions that continued shaping the institution even as the accreditation process moved forward.
A curriculum for the future
Angela Hobson, associate dean for education and professor of teaching, said ongoing reflection was at the heart of the self-study. The school’s educational foundation grew from WashU’s former public health program in the Brown School, which was an accredited program focused on preparing students to develop and apply evidence-based solutions to complex public health challenges through interdisciplinary collaboration and community partnerships.
“The accreditation document is called a self-study, and that really just means an opportunity to reflect upon and then demonstrate what we know about ourselves,” Hobson said. “The challenge — and the opportunity — was to reflect on years of work in an accredited program, understand what was working well and what we could do better as a school, then adapt to the new structures, processes, policies and culture we were simultaneously building.”
The review prompted education leaders to examine every course, competency and assessment to ensure students were gaining the knowledge and skills expected of today’s public health professionals.
“The overlapping processes of accreditation and building a new school have given us the perfect opportunity to take our foundational start and re-imagine our curriculum and our teaching practices to lean more heavily into leadership, communication, digital innovation and entrepreneurship,” Hobson said. “We are strategically designing for a future-ready public health workforce.”
When the site visit concluded, one comment stood above the rest.
“They said, ‘Your students are amazing,'” Vestal recalled. “‘Your alumni, too — they’re doing great work, and they really learned a lot from your program.’ That being their major takeaway made it all worth it.”
