February 9, 2012 - 1:45am
Professor Profile: Kenneth Warner
BY ZENA DAVE
What got you interested in Public Health and how did you get started?
The two biggest aspects of my career were getting into public health and getting into research on tobacco policy, and both of them were sort of accidental. The story behind how I got into public health was not a pleasant one, but that’s just the reality of it. My younger sister, my only sibling, was diagnosed with a very rare form of cancer when she was 17 and died when she was 21. I was in graduate school at the time, and frankly just feeling kind of impotent because there was nothing I could do, obviously. I was an economics graduate student at Yale, working on my Ph.D., and I decided I was going to do a Ph.D. dissertation relevant to what she was going through. She was going through chemotherapy, so I ended up doing a dissertation that related to the economics of cancer chemotherapy. That’s what got me into what we now call “the field of health economics” and then eventually public health.
What’s your favorite part about being a professor here at Michigan?
I love the variety and intellectual stimulation of being a professor here. It has always been important to me that I be at a research-intensive university. I love doing research, and in the case of public health and my own work, it is research that I like to think has impact on the real world.
What do you hope to leave your students with once they finish your class?
I want to give them some of the enthusiasm, and even love, that I have for the field of public health. I want them to appreciate its importance and frankly, it’s particularly important for me to get that message across to people who are going to be medical students because this society puts literally a trillion dollars a year into medical care, and just a few tens of billions of dollars into public health — all forms of it. The importance of public health in terms of actually influencing the health of the American people is enormous.
