Construction on Cunz Hall has begun and the college that will be moving in upon its completion is looking forward to the future.

The College of Public Health, Ohio State’s youngest college, will be moving its five core disciplines under the same roof for the first time.

Three of the discliplines are housed in Starling-Loving Hall, but with the other disciplines and faculty and staff scattered across campus in Smith Labs, Graves Hall and Howlett Hall.

“Right now, we’re spread across campus, borrowing space,” said Timothy Buckley, associate professor and chair of the Environmental Health Sciences Department. “It erodes our standing on campus.”

The upcoming move marks an “extremely exciting time,” said Stanley Lemeshow, dean of the college, and is “very symbolic” of the growth the college has made in recent years.

Now called a “college,” the sign of national accreditation for public health, the school was initially created in 1995 as a merger of two units — preventative medicine and health services administration — in the College of Medicine. Called the School of Public Health, it continued to operate within the College of Medicine.

“It was born out of medicine,” Buckley said.

In 2007, the school applied for college status and with “tremendous support” from former university president Karen Holbrook their application was approved by the OSU Board of Trustees, Lemeshow said. Public health was the first new college to be established at OSU in 20 years. The college is also the first and only accredited college of public health in Ohio.

In the six years since, the college has continued to expand. The number of faculty members has grown from 27 to 45. There are now 350 graduate students, up from 175.

“Our new faculty are amazing and wonderful,” Lemeshow said. “We have grown considerably.”

In addition to the graduate programs, a minor in public health at the undergraduate level has been offered for three years and over time there has been a “gradual increase in interest” in the minor, said Michael Bisesi, the associate dean of academic affairs for the college.

The minor “expands opportunities for possible employment and advanced studies” for students, Bisesi said.

An undergraduate major also may be available in the near future.

“We’re in the midst of exploring that possibility,” Bisesi said. “We’re still gathering data and determining if it’s the best approach.”

The mission of the college has also been adopted by other colleges at OSU, including the Veterinary School, with whom the college collaborates. College officials also received major grants from the National Institutes of Health and National Cancer Institute and funding for research programs has “tripled or quadrupled,” in recent years, Lemeshow said.

Despite the college’s progress, there remains room for improvement.

The college is still small and is not “very represented” at OSU, Buckley said.

“We’ve still got a lot of growing to do,” Buckley said.

One way for the college to grow is by educating students on something that they generally don’t know much about and by getting those students interested in their graduate programs.

“This is a very important time for public health,” Lemeshow said. “Students need to be aware of it.”

As health care costs continue to burden the country, public health should be at the center of importance, Buckley said.

“The current way of dealing with sickness is unsustainable,” Buckley said. “It takes a huge amount of resources to try and heal people who are sick. Public health takes the emphasis off healing and tries to prevent the disease to begin with.”

In basic terms, public health focuses on prevention rather than cures.

“Public health tends to look at the health of communities,” Buckley said. “Patterns of disease within that community can help form strategies for prevention.”

For example, cardiovascular disease is linked to smoking.

“That is an important disease for which we can eliminate a major cause,” Buckley said.

Public health also deals with things like safe drinking water or childhood obesity and how it impacts children’s health. Public health can also identify and deal with epidemics, like the H1N1 epidemic.

“We figure out how to deal with threats to our safety, whether they are natural [or] man made,” Lemeshow said. “We try to limit the spread of disease. We’re passionate about trying to make our world a better place.”

The goal of the college is to be completely moved into Cunz by Autumn Quarter 2011.

According to the College Web site, the total cost of the Cunz project is almost $24.4 million, with the college paying for 25 percent of that cost. The rest is covered by state funding.

Cunz is an “amazing location, at the interface between the Medical Center and Arts and Sciences,” and is a “perfect place” for the college, Lemeshow said.

“We’ve got a new spirit and we’re building something very exciting,” Lemeshow said. “We hope to grow in size to be similar to other large universities many times our size and attract more faculty and students. We want to get bigger and better.”

For more information on the College, visit http://cph.osu.edu/.

To keep updated on the Cunz Hall project’s progress, there is a Cunz Hall blog on the site authored by Renee Watts, facilities manager for the College. Watts is overseeing the project.