This episode is a look back for Dr. Cori Peek-Asa, professor and associate dean for research at the UI College of Public Health. She’s taking a new position at the University of California San Diego, and we look back on the impact she’s had during her time at the college, highlight favorite accomplishments and memories, and conclude with farewell wishes from special guests.

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Ben Sindt:

Hello, everyone. Welcome back to From the Front Row, brought to you by the University of Iowa College of Public Health. My name is Ben Sindt and I’m joined today by Alexis Clark. And if this is your first time with us, welcome, we’re a student-run podcast that talks about major issues in public health and how they are relevant to anyone, both in and out of the field of public health. Today, we will be chatting with the University of Iowa College of Public Health’s Associate Dean for Research and Distinguished Professor Dr. Cori Peek-Asa. This is a very bittersweet and special episode here on From the Front Row because we, here at the College of Public Health, have been so lucky to have Dr. Peek-Asa as a faculty member for over 20 years.

Ben Sindt:

Dr. Peek-Asa will be departing us and heading to the University of California, San Diego, one of our nation’s top academic research institutions, to serve as the Vice-Chancellor of Research. Welcome to the show.

Cori Peek-Asa:

Thank you so much. And it means a whole lot to me. It is bittersweet. It’s hard to leave such a wonderful place, and I think you all are very lucky to be here, and I’m so excited to see all the College and the University will do in the future.

Alexis Clark:

Well, the impact you’ve had on the University of Iowa and the College of Public Health has truly been immense. And we’re really lucky here, on From the Front Row, that you were able to squeeze us in. Before we jump in, can you tell us how you found yourself in the field of public health?

Cori Peek-Asa:

I think I stumbled into it, like most people. I think it’s becoming much better known earlier in students’ lives, what it is and how to get involved in it. But I got through college without ever hearing the words “public health”. But I was always interested in medical science, health science. So I think, like many people, I thought I wanted to be a doctor, so much so that I actually even got into the medical school and it became really clear to me that, as much as I loved the medical science, it wasn’t really treating patients that was my forte, or where I wanted to be. So I just recognized I was really interested in the data part of it and why some people got sick and others didn’t, and what to do about it, in particular, a focus on prevention rather than treatment.

Cori Peek-Asa:

And I was a work/study student in medical school and was working in the Medical Examiner’s Office, thinking that forensic pathology was a really good way to look at these issues. And it was just by luck that some of the work I did was with the SEER Registry in New Mexico, which is where I was in school. We have a SEER Registry here, that Chuck Lynch and Mary Charlton have run for a very long time. That was the counterpart of that. And I took some of the tumor samples from the bodies during autopsy.

Cori Peek-Asa:

So, I got starting to talk to some of the people involved in the Registry and figured out, “Okay, this is what public health is.” And it was immediately love at first sight. And my first opportunity, as a student, was to work on a project focused on pedestrian injuries among New Mexico’s Native American Pueblo populations. And it was just fascinating to think about how high the rates were—and some of the environmental reasons, the cultural reasons, the intersection of policy and behavior–that it was immediately what I loved. So, after that, I left studying medicine and went to UCLA to study epidemiology.

Alexis Clark:

So in the later part of your career, we know, from your accolades here at the University of Iowa, at some point, you sort of transformed into more of the strategic advancement of research. What does that really mean, for the average listener that doesn’t know anything about research?

Cori Peek-Asa:

Sure. Well, there are sort of a few points I want to take this. One is that, as a young professional, my focus was very much around strategically advancing my own research, both for my career, but also just for my own learning process. And, in academics, I really was able to see that the triumvirate of research and teaching education, and outreach and engagement, and impact, all really worked best together. And I think another piece of it is that I am absolutely a true believer that the scientific method is the best way to solve problems.

Cori Peek-Asa:

And we have some really hairy problems facing us. I don’t see any big social challenge we have, coming up, that doesn’t involve public health, in some way, and that wouldn’t benefit tremendously from using the public health science approach to solving it. So I think that what will come out of academic research, and public health contribution to that, is really where the positive future of our species progression will come from. And I know that’s a really big statement. But in climate change and equity, it’s, sort of, just the policies that hold us together as a species. I think there’s so much that we have to offer.

Cori Peek-Asa:

And, then, another piece of it is, one thing I love about public health research… And I think that being in public health research has helped me be competitive for a job that’s more university-wide, is it’s really interdisciplinary. To be successful, it has to be interdisciplinary. So really, early on, I think, researchers in Public Health get the perspective that it’s not your research. It’s really about an interdisciplinary team bringing their expertise together to solve a problem, which is a very, I think, meaningful way to spend your life.

Cori Peek-Asa:

But, because of the interdisciplinary nature, it, sort of, gives you these peeks into what others accomplish, and that your research accomplishes so much more when your team is also creative, and engaged, and having a good time. So, it wasn’t a very big step from that to really being able to see that it is a lot more fulfilling.

Cori Peek-Asa:

Once you’ve established yourself, and your presence as an academic, or a researcher, or, if working in private industry, where you sit on interdisciplinary teams, for both advancing the problem, but also just feeling very enriched in what you’ve done to advance other people’s careers. So it has been, in some ways, selfish to be able to invest in building capacity of other teams, other people. I mean, it’s selfish in the sense that it’s really fulfilling to do that.

Ben Sindt:

So you talked a lot about interdisciplinary work. But you specifically are in the Occupational Environmental Health Department, here at the College of Public Health. Can you speak on why you think that department is crucial, as a part of comprehensive public health?

Cori Peek-Asa:

Sure. You know, as a trained epidemiologist, I’m an applied epidemiologist. So I really want to apply epidemiologic methods to solving problems. And, where I was at UCLA, the field of injury and violence prevention, which is my research focal area, almost sat more in environment. So different colleges just have different pieces of injury and violence prevention sitting in different places. So the environment is, in my use of the word, really broad. So there’s the environment, there’s policy and policy structure, and there’s behavior. And those pieces all intersect to sort of, create how we move forward in our health trajectories. So the built environment, the chemical and biological environment, the cultural sociocultural environment, are all really important pieces of solving health problems. And I think, also, the workplace is such a unique microcosm of the environment. It’s a place where so many people spend a lot of their life.

Cori Peek-Asa:

It’s a place where there is a lot of investment in people doing well, feeling well, working well. And I think even more and more, over time, employers are recognizing how important the wellness of their workforce is, for [inaudible 00:07:55] and for performance. So it gives us a lot of opportunities to test prevention strategies, some that fit specifically in the workplace, but some that are much more focused on infectious disease control or chronic disease management or injury and violence prevention, because you can test things in a very controlled environment and see how they work and scale them up in workplaces, or scale them up outside of workplaces. So even though epidemiology is its very specific core methods, and occupational environmental health doesn’t have that core, but it has so many pieces that are important to applied problem solving that, I think, it is a very important component of what we do in public health.

Alexis Clark:

So reflecting back on what you have learned from directing one of six NIH-funded international trauma training programs, and in your past appointment, as the Director of Interdisciplinary CDC-funded Injury Prevention Research, how will you take what you’ve learned in those experiences and translate them into your future role?

Cori Peek-Asa:

Yeah, I am very thankful that the experiences I’ve had at the University of Iowa in the College of Public Health, and working with these centers, has, I think, I hope, really prepared me well for a job with a very big research portfolio and very diverse research portfolio. And, from the Injury Prevention Research Center side, I think the Center has grown and become very successful because of its embracing interdisciplinary science and that, that science should be informed by the people who live the life every day, so practitioners, community members. And I think that, that’s, kind of, where a lot of pieces of science want to be. And public health is already there. So I think we need to own that conversation and we do community-engaged research. Lots of fields do community-engaged research, but the extent to which we define the problem around what the community is experiencing, is very important.

Cori Peek-Asa:

And I think that, as I’ve been involved in the growth of both the international training center and the injury center, the more I advance as a leader, the more humbling it is because the more I see creative solutions sitting in so many different corners. So one of the most important pieces of being a center director or leading a research program, may be twofold. One is to make sure that the teams can do the work with as little barrier as possible. So how can the environment really support that creative problem-solving time that research teams can have together? And then, the second is making sure that the voice is really equal and that the leader is bringing those voices together. I’ll just think of an example. As the Associate Dean for Research, I was hosting, kind of, a grant-writing club. So faculty, regardless of what, if they were writing their grant on, would meet and review each other’s ideas and pieces that were written to work towards the final grant proposal.

Cori Peek-Asa:

There ended up being two participants who focused on network analysis. But it was so interesting because they did it in completely different topics and completely different ways. One used artificial intelligence to measure really complex networks within bodies of data. And the other expert used more of a survey people-based approach and hearing them talk about network analysis and the goals of what you learn from network analysis, from two completely different methodological perspectives, was really exciting and it opened up… Opportunities are our minds’ creative avenues that none of us, in the room, had thought of before.

Cori Peek-Asa:

And I do worry that life is getting so busy and there’s so much work to get done that leaders need to protect the spaces to bring creative minds together and allow some of that free-thinking, wild idea time because, ultimately, I think the scientific process and the creative process is, it’s really messy. We would love it to be hypothesis A is tested and leads to hypothesis B that’s tested and leads then to hypothesis C. And that just isn’t how it works. It’s like, “Oh, here’s hypothesis A. We were wildly wrong, but we understand why.” So hypothesis D is taking little bits of that, influenced by other completely different ways of thinking to really advance what we’re trying to solve.

Ben Sindt:

You have a long list of accolades, of research, scientific methods. Is there any specific strides in research that you’ve accomplished, or you witnessed, that have just been very impactful, very surprising?

Cori Peek-Asa:

I mean, things have changed a lot in my time. So definitely one of the biggest changes is the advances in technology. And I think that’s good and bad. You know, when I was starting out as an epidemiology student… I mean, when I started out, I literally… Some of my first data programs were written on cards. You filled out little dots in cards and you took your cards to a card reader that ran it through the big fancy computer, that was literally huge because the components were so big. And then you got back two by two tables. And to see how much the technology has enabled advances in how we solve problems has been really, really hard to keep up with, but also really exciting. And it comes with caveats, because it’s now so easy to run a really complicated model that, sometimes, you don’t think about all the little pieces that go into, “Is it really right? Is it really the right model?”

Cori Peek-Asa:

It reminds me of a study we did with Home Depot to look at back injuries, and they had had a new policy. That’s not so important, but the project itself was evaluating a policy to reduce worker back injury. And we spent a year collecting the data, managing the data, coding the data. So we knew exactly what all the answers to all the variables were, handling missing data, I mean, 12 months of brutal detailed work in what the data structure should be like. And then we ran a [Poisson 00:14:23] model in 35 minutes. And now I think we don’t pay as much attention to those details on the data side, but that’s really where the secrets are to what we need to learn. So definitely the technology is a very exciting advancement. And it’s, again, this humbling process. The students that get out of epidemiology programs today are so much more advanced than I am now.

Cori Peek-Asa:

So it’s really… That’s another thing, research and education fitting so well together. The research wedded with the training is how these advances really take hold and change the culture. I think the other piece that’s been very gratifying is, as much as we need foundational health research and that has propelled us in treatment advances in really important ways, to me, it’s been exciting to see agencies change priorities, to be a little bit more impact-related and a little bit more focused on equity. And especially the equity focus is not new in many agencies. But it, certainly in the last 12 months, has become a higher priority. And I think when we are advocates for population prevention strategies that change systems to improve health, we need that to be a priority in how we fund the research we do. So seeing agencies like [NIH 00:15:43] talk about implementation science is really exciting.

Ben Sindt:

You’ve been involved in a decent amount of formal and informal committees throughout your career. How do you feel like that’s propelled you and gotten to the point of where you are now?

Cori Peek-Asa:

Yeah, that’s a good question. And I think it’s something, in mentoring, we need to talk about because how you spend the time that officially fits in service is very important because it can suck you in. And you need to know why you’re spending that time. And there are a lot of reasons. Being on committees and professional organizations is really important for building your network. And I think it’s true of me and not everyone, but a lot of people in science, that we don’t tend to be being really social, and bringing a lot of people together is not always the first thing do when we get up in the morning. So I think that these professional organizations and the committees that are doing goal-based work are really a nice way to comfortably build that network. But it does take a concerted effort to really make that connection to other people, kind of, get to know someone on a personal level. And that’s something I learned over time.

Cori Peek-Asa:

I’m not just there to talk about the Science Committee. I’m also there to get to know the people on the Science Committee as colleagues and fellow people in my field. But, over time, what I also find myself gravitating towards are smaller decision-making groups. So, rather than trying to find a committee that’s the least amount of work, I try to find one that is really focused work. So the product is going to be a white paper that other people read to change the work they do, or volunteering to be on the committee that’s writing the paper. That is a little bit more work with the product is something that has, not only a big impact, but also in doing that kind of focused work, you do get to know the people really well. And that’s helpful.

Alexis Clark:

I think, going off of that, when you think.., And you mentioned earlier that you really are fulfilled by the work you do. When getting so involved in your career, how did you balance your family life and your friends, and just thinking about all of these students that are listening right now, what advice can you give to make sure that you have time for everything that you want to be involved with? Because nothing’s saying that you can’t do it all because obviously you can.

Cori Peek-Asa:

Well, I would say that’s a really high bar. I think even balance is a high bar. And I don’t know if that’s really the goal. It’s really more sustainability, maybe. So, I started off my faculty life at UCLA as an assistant professor and had two daughters, and was really kind of freaked out about, how was I going to get tenure and deal with my kids? And I didn’t really own my responsibility of being a full person. So I had made up a committee that I could pull up when I felt like I had to be away for my family. So I wouldn’t say, “Oh, I am leaving at three o’clock today because it is the daycare parade,” which would’ve been fine for me to say. But I wasn’t brave enough to say, “This is my priority and I’m going to go see my kids.”

Cori Peek-Asa:

I said, “I’m going to go to this community blah, blah, blah committee.” And I think that, in retrospect, I wish I had been braver, because I think it sets a really good precedent. And other advice is that it’s really not balance in any small moment. There are times when you’re going to have to devote more to your work. Then, it’s to make sure you, then, take time for your personal life. So it’s really a lot of prioritization, at the moment, of what’s the most important big thing right now, and making sure, over the long term, in the big picture, you’re devoting enough time to all your little pockets of influence. But it’s never about the one moment, and feeling guilty about, “Oh, I didn’t get this… My to-do list said I was going to finish this chapter tonight and I didn’t get it done because I watched Netflix,” and don’t beat yourself up about that. Just find, “Okay, when is the time to get the chapter done?”, and being forgiving with yourself that, that’s the case.

Cori Peek-Asa:

We had a meeting this morning, of the College Leadership Team, talking about how do we get people to take vacation. We all know that time away from work is good for work. It’s good for regenerating. It’s good for your mind, working in the background about all those things you’re thinking about. But we just have such a strong culture about feeling like we have to answer email in 24 hours. And I think spending some time to think about what, of that, is really self-imposed and what’s not? And one of the things that I’ve done, to be successful in moving my research forward, is being very thoughtful in how I’m prioritizing the big pieces and the little pieces, and giving myself an opportunity to say no, when it’s not the right next step.

Cori Peek-Asa:

Our former Dean, Sue Curry, gave me some really good advice about saying no, which is, we always have a tendency to say yes to things in the future. So we’ve become very adept at asking for things early. So people will say yes. And her bar is that, if someone were to ask you to do this thing tomorrow, what would you say? And if you would say “no” tomorrow, you probably would say “no” in six months too. Nothing in your life is going to foundationally shift so much in six months that it would change your prioritization of these different things. So the immediate no is a good strategy to use.

Cori Peek-Asa:

I think I’ve wandered a little bit from the original question, but… And the other thing to recognize is actually there are so many things I want to do. There are so many parallel lives I can imagine, where I would follow different trajectories in different ways. So it’s just a whole lot of pressure to, kind of, think it is the goal to do all of those things. And, with my daughters, it’s so stressful to figure out what you want to do with your life. And we even decided it was too stressful to tell them, “Do what you love,” because there’s so many things to love. So our advice to them is, “If you hate what you’re doing, do something else and it’ll all work out.”

Alexis Clark:

So, thinking back from your entire tenure thus far, it’s obviously not over, but, just so far, what has been your accomplishment throughout your career that you are most proud about?

Cori Peek-Asa:

That’s hard. I really think it would be the growth of the Injury Prevention Research Center. It has become such an important place for people to connect. And, because of that, I think it has contributed far beyond the investment. It’s one of the smallest federal centers. And I think that the reason I’m proud of it is that it has been an exemplar of bringing teams together and really fostering the creativity and the shared voice of different perspectives on problems, and creating that space for collaboration, and really focused on that conversation and the goals being focused on solving real problems that are impacting individuals, families, communities, lives, in really negative ways, victims of violence, people with traumatic brain injuries, both the people who are injured in car crashes and the people who cause car crashes. Those are traumas that really, sort of, derail us from moving forward. And seeing that we can of an impact on that is something I’ve really enjoyed seeing.

Cori Peek-Asa:

So, Dr. Carri Casteel is now the Director of the Injury Center, and it was really… You know, in some ways you think, “Oh, I’m giving up the directorship of something I love so much,” but it was such a happy experience because she… I was very proud that it was in a really good shape to turn over, but also at a time when it was so for new energy and new ideas and Carri was so ready to bring those ideas. So I think that we need to really recognize that leadership transitions are sad because a leader is leaving, but they also are amazing opportunities for new things.

Ben Sindt:

Yeah. I have Carri, currently, for a class, and I think she’ll do a great job taking over. She’s a very, very great person, but speaking of great people, you’ve been in Iowa for 20 years now. Clearly, the University has kept you around this long. What are some of your favorite memories of the University of Iowa, in general?

Cori Peek-Asa:

Oh, Iowa has been a wonderful place. I have many memories. It’s hard to even… What are the right ones to share? So, moving from Los Angeles, one of the first studies I inherited was evaluating smoke alarm technology. And to do the study, we needed to install specific types of smoke alarms randomized into different people’s homes. So I remember hearing about this study that I inherited and thinking, “There’s no way. There’s no way we can get this done, because who is going to let us walk into their house, put in a smoke alarm and then come back and test it?” Of course, I was coming from Los Angeles. And it turns out the biggest problem we had was, that it took too long to install the smoke alarms because the field operators would talk about what they were doing. They’d be invited into the house and then they’d be invited to have some pie, and some coffee and you hear about how things were going.

Cori Peek-Asa:

So, it wasn’t that people wouldn’t let us in. It’s that they really wanted to talk, too. And we couldn’t, not do that. So the study was delayed, but for reasons that I can all only say are Iowa reasons. And I think that openness to new ideas, to working with people, is something I really enjoyed here. It’s been an amazingly high quality of both work and personal life.

Cori Peek-Asa:

Let’s see. Another… So, we had gone to Senator Tom Harkin’s big picnic that he has out in this big field back then. Senator Harkin is just a monumental influence in public health, as a long-term Senator in Iowa. If you’ve not heard of Tom Harkin, it’s very important homework to look him up. But he had a fundraiser out in a field where there was a big picnic. And I remember we were driving home and it was, kind of… It wasn’t very organized. There were people parked in the field. So there was, kind of, this group of lines of cars and no one was going and everyone was waiting for someone else to go.

Cori Peek-Asa:

And I think I was driving and I honked the horn and everyone’s like, “Oh my gosh, what happened?” And you know, just that it’s sort of frustrating, but also just nice that everyone, kind of waits, for you to take your turn, rather than being the first one in line. So the driving has been both, in some ways, such a nice civil thing, but also, sometimes, frustrating for a big city driver that you just go, “If it’s your right-of-way, just go.” I don’t know what made me think of driving. But…

Alexis Clark:

So Ben been mentioned earlier that you are his academic advisor, but there’s been so many comments about your connection with students and your teaching abilities. If you had to give any advice to the earlier faculty members, coming up in their tenure, what could you tell them?

Cori Peek-Asa:

Well, that’s really nice to hear, so thank you. That’s wonderful. I think one thing is that I never forgot what it’s like to be a student. And I remember some of the things that I found so stressful and so, sometimes, to me, irrelevant in my learning path. And I tried not to perpetuate those you know, like forgetting that your students are real people who have real things that come up and being a little forgiving about that. So I think, recognizing that students have a very complex life in which they’re moving their training forward. You know, I also think I am remembering my… I’m a horrible test taker, standardized tests. I’m surprised I got even into a college at all, because I am horrible at taking tests. I don’t think that means I’m not smart. It just is a type of intelligence that manifest myself, and I’m not a quick, intuitive thinker. I don’t have a very good memory. I’m a slow-plotting, strategic thinker.

Cori Peek-Asa:

And I think it’s important to play to students’ strengths in a way that they can apply information rather than regurgitate it, and really spend some time thinking about how the knowledge fits in their process of thinking.

Cori Peek-Asa:

It does make it challenging to teach really big classes because I’m just not good at test-based classes. It’s much more project oriented, and that’s not for every student. Some students are really good at huge mountains of information and can move quick, quick, quick, and don’t want to spend a lot of time. So I’m quite sure I am not successful in teaching every type of learner. But I definitely think, remembering what it’s like as a student.

Cori Peek-Asa:

Sometimes, instructors will explain something and think it’s so clear. And you’re like, “I don’t understand a word of what you just said.” So I think it’s something you learn in epidemiology because it’s a science, but it’s not wholly a science. There’s some art to it. So hearing something one way and then hearing the same thing in a slightly different way, or from a different perspective, is also really important in teaching new concepts.

Alexis Clark:

So yeah, definitely. So, looking ahead to California and the move, and your new position, what excites you the most about what the future holds?

Cori Peek-Asa:

Oh gosh, well the UCSD campus is an exciting place right now, because it is in the huge growth trajectory for research. And it was just named in the top five of cited scientists. It’s gaining on MIT. So it’s way up there. And it’s really interdisciplinary and their saying is, “Every flower has the opportunity to bloom.” So it’s very rare that anyone hears, “No, you can’t try that.” It’s, “How do we try to make this work?” So it’s a very exciting environment. It’s a terrifying environment, because that leads to a lot of chaos and mess. And I know that’s, kind of, my job to try to control the chaos and mess and keep it moving forward. But I’m really excited to step into that.

Cori Peek-Asa:

And, so much in life is a conflict, rather than, as an epidemiologist, I want to put something in a yes, no two-by-two table, and almost nothing sits there. So on one hand, it is so hard to leave the field of public health. And, in my new job, I have an Associate Vice-Chancellor for Health Sciences. So the Health Scientists don’t even report directly to me. They report through someone else. So reporting to me directly are things like nanotechnology, and the Scripps Institute for Oceanography, and the Crypto Science Group, and the Innovation and Technology, so things that aren’t public health. And I am so excited to learn more about those fields and be part of moving the capacity for research forward, while at the same time, it is so hard to be stepping away from public health as my core. And my values just fit so well in public health. So I’ll take those with me and public health will always be a special place in my heart, but it won’t be my focus anymore.

Ben Sindt:

Yeah. So life is always about learning new things, but what’s one thing that maybe you thought you really knew, but later it proved to be wrong?

Cori Peek-Asa:

That’s such a good question. And you know, I can say almost everything. My trajectory of learning is, really, the more you know, the more you know you don’t know, or the more you learn you don’t know. So let’s see if I can think of a good example, cause I’ve been thinking about this and haven’t come up with a really great one. Well, one is, sort of, how I approach the field of epidemiology. It really was kind of a humbling process. I really was proud of being what I considered a methodologist, which wouldn’t hold water these days. But in my day, I really was proud of being very focused on methods and, “What is the most efficient way to get the standard error estimated in this model and all the assumptions we go into the model?” And I, sort of, watched myself a little bit or read papers that I’d written. And I realized I was, kind of, letting methods drive the question. And it’s something I talk to students about because O came up with some things that sounded fancy, but were absolutely unhelpful, in contributing to solving a problem.

Cori Peek-Asa:

So I really have, kind of, come full swing of being a very methods-based epidemiologist to being much more applied, and really focusing on the methods being the tool to advance the decision that you want to make, the problem that you want to solve, so much more of a tool than the focus. And it’s not that, that’s wrong. I mean, certainly I need to work with methodologists, because we need those methods to be right. But I think where I fit, in the world of team science, continues to evolve. And I think I was just, kind of, wrong about where my talents were, early on.

Alexis Clark:

I think as someone that has no experience with research, even that, statement that you just said, that you need the methodology and the application, can be applied to so many facets of life besides public health. That concludes our episode. I know I’ve learned a lot and I’m sure everyone’s learned a lot. Dr. Peek-Asa. Thank you, so much, for everything. And we truly, truly wish you the best of luck in California.

Cori Peek-Asa:

Well, thank you so much. Again, thank you for this opportunity. Iowa will always be in my heart, and I will always be eager to see anyone from the College who’s visiting San Diego.

Alexis Clark:

We here at the College of Public Health would like to thank Dr. Peek-Asa for everything that she’s accomplished so far, and good luck to everything she will in the future. Keep listening for well wishes from two students and Dean Parker, as we conclude Dr. Peek-Asa’s farewell episode.

Anna Proctor:

Hi there. This is Anna Proctor. I am a second-year Master’s student in the OEH Department, and I’ve had the honor of having Dr. Peek-Asa as a professor, as well as a mentor during weekly departmental meetings. She truly embodies the characteristics of a phenomenal professor. And I feel privileged to have had the opportunity to learn from her over the past year and a half. I’ve enjoyed taking classes from her, immensely, and I’m really sad to see her go. But she’s going to do amazing things in her new role. And I wish her and her family the best in the future.

Eliza Steere:

Hi, my name is Eliza Steere and I’m a fourth-year undergraduate to graduate Master of Public Health student in the Department of Community and Behavioral Health. I took public health policy and advocacy with Dr. Peek-Asa in the spring of 2021. I learned so much through this course because of how passionate Dr. Peek-Asa is about the work she does and encouraging students to learn more about their role in health policy. I will definitely miss her so much and can’t thank her enough for everything she has done for students within the College of Public Health.

Dean Parker:

Cori has made many extraordinarily scientific accomplishments as a public health researcher, and she’s just provided outstanding vision and leadership at the College and then also nationally. So we’re, really, really going to miss her. But we’re so excited for her, and I could not be more confident that she’s so suited to succeed in her new role.

Dean Parker:

But I think, if you think about specifically what she’s done for us in the remarkable service over the past 20 years, she’s inspired a generation of students. She’s mentored faculties and staff. She’s developed nationally renowned research programs, led innovative community engagement initiatives, and has served tirelessly to advance our college and our university, and also to contribute to the State of Iowa.

Dean Parker:

And I just want to share a few words that folks said about her on an electronic card. They wrote things such as that they would remember her leadership in research. They found her inspirational. She had amazing mentorship. She was just a fantastic advocate for the College of Public Health and for public health, in general, and that she really made a difference, not only for the College, but for the citizens of Iowa. So I just want to end and say that we are really sad to see her go. But we know that she’s going to continue to do really remarkable things. And we’re just so excited for her, for this wonderful new position. I know that she’ll be such a great addition to UC San Diego.