Collegiate Resources

The University of Iowa College of Public Health was formed in 1999 and is the newest college at the University of Iowa. The college builds on a rich tradition of public health teaching, research, and service at the university that dates back to 1885. Today, the College of Public Health (CPH) is composed of five departments: biostatistics; community and behavioral health; epidemiology; health management and policy; and occupational and environmental health.

The College of Public Health’s resources are extensive. The college has a strong infrastructure of research, technological, outreach, and facilities resources. In 2012, the CPH moved into a new state-of-the art building to house its teaching and administrative functions. The new CPH building with 79,000 net square feet was designed with 125 faculty offices and 35 postdoctoral offices. Each department has a dedicated suite for faculty and support staff that includes conference space. The student space, located on the second level, consists of a student commons area, a quiet computer lab, and a “noisy” computer lab. Near the student space are located four teaching assistant offices, a student services area including graduate coordinator and recruitment services, and distance learning and audio/visual services. The CPH Information Technology Services, Offices of the Dean, Administration Services, Communications and External Relation Services, and a café and dining area are all located on the first floor. Seating areas are located in the atrium on the first through fourth floors. Several storage areas and the Information Technology Services server room are located on the lower level.

The teaching space in the new building comprises eight classrooms and two computer classrooms. The classrooms include three 50‐seat divisible classrooms located on the lower level, first floor, and second floor; a 200‐seat auditorium and a 100‐seat tiered classroom located on the first floor; a 50-seat tiered classroom located on the lower level; two centrally located 20‐seat seminar classrooms on the third and fourth floors; and computer classrooms on the second and fourth floors. The Departments of Biostatistics and Health Management and Policy have dedicated computer lab space for their students. Several small collegiate meeting rooms are located off of the atrium on each floor.

The College of Public Health research enterprise occupies space in eight buildings on the UI campuses in Iowa City and in the Research Park and three locations off-campus, for a total of 169,000 square feet. These buildings share a common infrastructure for such services as Information Technology Support, Communications and Outreach support, and Central Administration.

The College of Public Health provides an educational and research focus to the many public health efforts at the University of Iowa. The CPH has identified three Areas of Collective Excellence in which we excel in interdisciplinary and collaborative research, teaching, and service: Rural Health, Comparative Effectiveness Research, and Community Engagement. Examples of areas of interest include: rural public health research and training; statistical analysis and data management; occupational health; health care access research and policy expertise; patient outcomes research; cancer and birth defects surveillance; community-based participatory research; and service to public health practitioners through the Institute for Public Health Practice.

The college houses 28 centers and has roughly 75 primary faculty. It has traditional laboratories supporting interdisciplinary research in environmental health, toxicology, industrial hygiene, infectious disease control, ergonomics, and injury prevention. The college also has extensive research facilities for housing population and community-based research. Graduates are provided advanced training leading to master’s and doctoral degrees that prepare students for leadership roles in various health care, research, and academic settings.
Building on traditions and forging new collaborative partnerships across campus, Iowa,  the nation, and globally, the College of Public Health is a premier state-assisted school of public health and a leader in addressing public health challenges of the 21st century.

Departmental and Center Resources

• Departmental Summaries
• Collegiate Center Summaries

Office of Information Technology

The general-purpose computing facilities available to the College of Public Health are extensive. In 2011, a central collegiate data center was completed within the newly constructed College of Public Health Building. This data center contains the capacity to support departmental and collegiate servers currently with room for expansion. The facility includes climate controlled redundant air cooling and humidity sensors, gigabit network bandwidth, efficient electrical power (220v), power conditioning and backup (Uninterrupted Power Supplies), backup power via generator, and restricted access controls including two factor authentication with entry and exit logging. Within the College, the local area network infrastructure consists of a combination of Microsoft Windows and Ubuntu Linux Servers with over 90 terabyte of server storage space. The office also provides support for cloud computing, including the design and implementation of highly available and scalable services on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Backups of file, web, database, and application servers are run daily and replicated to an offsite location for disaster recovery. RAID technology is used on servers to allow for a more fault tolerant method of disk implementation to allow for less down time and easier recovery from disk failures.

Virtual Private Network (VPN) and Terminal Services servers are available to offsite and traveling faculty, staff, and students. Network security and protection are top priorities within the College, requiring password authentication to all network resources and in some cases, password and data encryption. Software firewalls and IP Security (IPsec) filtering have been installed to protect servers. Secure Socket Layer (SSL) is incorporated into Internet-based web data and web mail. Anti-virus & spyware software have been implemented across the College to assist with data protection. Information Technology staff monitor event logs, including security audit logs, applications logs, and system logs when needed to identify errors on systems and maintain security. Event logs for sensitive systems are centrally collected (when requested) to offer a more robust log monitoring solution and meet more strict auditing regulations.

Collegiate IT policies, plans, and procedures include Contingency and Disaster Recovery Plan, Incident Handling, Risk Assessment Management and Analysis, Facility Security Plan, Systematic Change Control Procedures, Data Destruction and Sanitization Guidelines, Server Monitoring and Audit Procedures, and Enterprise Password Policy. The collegiate Office of Information Technology requires IT staff to attend HIPAA and FERPA training, as well as read and sign an annual Confidentiality Statement. The College network supports over 1000 personal computers, 10 Linux workstations, a host of local and network printers and scanners, and several student computing facilities including collaborative computer work areas and classrooms. The local area network is connected to the University of Iowa campus and Internet through the campus fiber optic network.

The University of Iowa Information Technology Services (ITS) department provides the following campus resources:

• General Services: e-mail, electronic calendaring, telephones and voicemail, centrally-managed desktops; University-wide directory services; file and print sharing; server hosting; mobile computing support
• Web Services: hosting web sites for faculty, staff, and students; ICON (Iowa Courses Online) for hosting web-based course sites.
• Video Services: Campus Video System; UITV; satellite services; video conferencing; video web streaming; video production; video post-production
• Administrative Information Services/Systems: academic and financial student records, library automation, central business office functions, human resources, payroll, and personnel services, MyUI (web portal for students to register for classes, get grade reports, and access other services).
• Internet Network access: campus Ethernet data network; campus wireless network; remote access
• Software: Campus Software Program-site licensed software for faculty, staff, and students
• Hardware: Computer Purchase Program-educational discounts for faculty and staff purchase of computers, Computer Demo Center , virus disinfecting for students

Support

• General:Customer Information Desk; Help Desk; web, office, thesis, web survey and statistics software support.
• Instructional Computing: Course websites; software development; training; digital media
• Research Computing: Visualization; grid computing; bioinformatics; computational services; web development; collaborative tools; scientific consulting; training
• Facilities: Instructional Technology Centers (student computing labs); Studio 107 (assistance for faculty)

Hardin Library for the Health Sciences

Hardin library has over 370,000 volumes including books, videos and DVDs and access to over 14,000 periodical titles, 2,500 current journal subscriptions and the John Martin Rare Book Room – nearly 5,000 volumes devoted to the history of health sciences.

The Hardin Library web site provides access to thousands of online resources including databases, journals, and books. The web site also provides users with current library news, policies, and other important information regarding the library. The library staff provides an array of services to its users including instruction, consultation, finding aids, document delivery, circulation, and research assistance.

The library liaisons to the Colleges of Medicine, Nursing, Pharmacy, Dentistry, and Public Health provide specialized, tailored services for the various colleges including course content support, access to clinical tools, and research assistance. In addition to housing the collections, the library has a large amount of space for research and reading, and can accommodate over 700 users including 6 group study rooms and a 24-hour study room.

The Information Commons, Hardin Library’s state-of-the-art health sciences educational technology facility, offers two networked electronic classrooms supporting both Windows and Linux operating systems, a case-based learning/conference room, and information research workstations for searching health-related databases and the Internet.  The Hardin Library provides access to healthcare simulation services.

The University Library and the various departmental libraries contain over four million volumes. The Main Library is located approximately 1/4 mile from the College of Public Health Building.