Michael Stoto

Professor of Health Systems Administration and Population Health
Age: 60
Hometown: Jersey City, N.J.
Education: A.B. Princeton University, Statistics; Ph.D. Harvard University, Statistics
Areas of Research: Public health practice and policy, different ways of improving healthcare
Time at Georgetown: 8 years full-time, 15 years as adjunct
Courses Taught: Health services research, used to teach Epidemiology and Population Health and Quality Improvement Sequence, law center class called Global Public Health Law

What is the most fascinating question in your field of study?
I do a lot of work in public health and emergency preparedness. People often ask the question, “Are we prepared?” The more I’ve thought of that question, the more I think that that is not the right question. The right question is when, actually, we do experience public health emergencies of various types, what did we learn from that? About how to do a better job next time.

What is the greatest challenge in your field today?
The biggest challenge is that when you have … public health emergencies are all unique. You may have a hurricane here and another hurricane some place not here and the circumstances are different. You may have an influenza pandemic one year and another one 15 years later and it’s different. It’s characteristics of the virus, or the epidemiology are different. We talk a lot in our course about performance measurement; people get their aspirin when they come into the emergency department. Well the whole stream of people coming into the emergency department over time with heart attacks and you can measure them statistically. You can’t use statistical measurements with these one off events. So you really have to study them in a qualitative way and learn how to read more information each individual event.

How did you narrow your focus to what you study today?
I had 40 years to evolve, you know? But it was part because I studied demography when I was in college and in graduate school as sort of an adjunct to statistics and that got me into population health. I started working with professors who were interested in public health issues. I had a first teaching job at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, but I was looking for an opportunity to come to Washington to get some policy experience, and an opportunity came up to work at the Institute of Medicine and then, you know, the projects they had led me to one thing or another. I started working at the RAND corporation three days before 9/11 and when, after 9/11 and the anthrax attacks, they decided to bring together the expertise they had in national security and health policy to work on health security and as the new guy on the block who actually had some public health experience, I was in a good position to help out with that and that really has been most of the research I’ve been doing for the last 10 years or so in that area.

How do you balance teaching here at Georgetown and the research you do there?
I don’t regard it as a balance but as — they interact in a positive way. Everything you guys hear me talk about in class, half the things you guys hear me talk about in class come out of the research that I did. I mentioned today something the National Quality Forum is doing, I’m actually on the advisory committee of the National Quality Forum doing that thing. So it’s not a matter of balance at all, the other thing I have to balance is my time. But the fact that I learn from one and bring it to another and so on.

What’s the most memorable encounter you’ve had with a student while teaching here?
Well I’ve had the good luck to work with two different students in our program who subsequently became research assistants for me in my research. So it’s not just one particular moment but it’s seeing them both develop — both of them went off to get master’s degrees and continue to work with me in different ways. And you get to sort of see their trajectory from the kind of stuff we do in our program and how it’s integrated in their research and how that develops in their own profession.

If you weren’t in academia, what would you be doing instead?
I’ve gone back and forth. … I’ve worked both at the RAND corporation and the Institute of Medicine doing policy oriented research and the remarkable thing is that the day-to-day work that I do is not too different, because what I’m interested in in my academic job — I do a lot of that stuff on the research side and consulting with these organizations. And when I was working full time in those, I was teaching part time here at Georgetown and other places. So it’s just a question of the proportion of time rather than the nature of what I do.

What drew you to Georgetown and why do you like teaching here?
Well those are two different things. What drew me to Georgetown was the opportunity, my work brought me to Washington, and so the opportunity to kind of help translate what I do in my research work and so on into the educational system was a lot easier because Georgetown is here in D.C. And it also works in teaching when you bring in people from the policy perspective. But what I found is, I’ll tell you the Jesuit values really make a difference for 35 years. I’ve been associated with Harvard in different ways because I teach there in the summer and do my research with them. And I recall one time the new dean came in a couple years ago and he mentioned social justice, and I said, “Wow, this is the first time after all these years that I’ve heard somebody mention social justice.” And I didn’t hear it again since then. But at Georgetown we talk about values and care about values. You know? And it falls into everything we do. And to me, I feel that’s what makes Georgetown special, is that we can really care about things and care about these values and integrate that into the rigorous scientific and educational program. They’re not seen as opposites of one another but integral.

Interview by Michelle Xu