Director of the Community Health Program (CHP) Edith Balbach, a senior lecturer known for her unique ability to simultaneously amuse, engage and inspire students in her 200-person Introduction to Community Health (CH 1) class, will retire this spring after fifteen years on the Hill.
The program has witnessed significant growth both in numbers of full-time staff and majors during Balbach's tenure, according to Associate Professor of Public Health and Community Medicine Linda Martinez. The program this year graduates its largest-ever class of 78 majors, which Martinez attributes largely to Balbach's leadership. The average class size of CH 1 has also grown from less than 100 when Balbach first arrived to its current enrollment of approximately 200.
Richard Glickman-Simon, an assistant professor of public health and community medicine, noted that interest in the community health program, which was first created in 1975, grew dramatically upon Balbach's arrival.
"It seemed to me every year there were more and more students, and now the program is very large," he said.
Glickman-Simon also credits Balbach with precipitating the change in 2002 that enabled students to pursue Community Health as a second major, rather than only as a certificate program.
Balbach's dynamic instruction of CH 1 grabbed the attention of students with little prior interest in the subject, according to graduating senior Joshua Malkin, who is Balbach's advisee.
"CH 1 is just a really great class, really engaging," he said. "I think Professor Balbach is responsible for drawing a significant majority of people who go on to become community health majors."
Junior Liz Moynihan, another of Balbach's advisees, also attributes much of her interest in the CHP to Balbach's charismatic teaching of the introductory course.
"As a rising senior looking back on my choice to become a community health major, I can honestly say a large part of it was because of Professor Balbach," Moynihan said. "I remember being captivated by her enthusiasm and relaxed demeanor as a lecturer in CH 1."
Balbach acknowledged that the increased strength of the program in recent years could have played a part in drawing prospective students to the university.
"I think people come to Tufts now because they're interested in community health," she said. "I'm not sure that that was true before ... I think we have been able to inspire a lot of people to careers in public health or, if they go to medical school, they have a public health sensibility," she said. "I think that's been really gratifying. I'm really glad we were able to do that."
Balbach, who received her Ph.D. in public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, is an expert in drug policy and specializes in research on tobacco. Prior to coming to Tufts, she simultaneously held a research position along with three part-time teaching roles in California.
"I wanted a job where teaching was not an adjunct, but a central, part of what I did," she said. "This job combined a nice amount of teaching and just enough administration to be interesting, but not so much as to be overwhelming."
Trumpeting her "smoking is bad" mantra, Balbach has engaged dozens of students in her grant work through the National Cancer Institute and has always sought out research opportunities for undergraduate students, Martinez noted.
"She's so committed to students, and student development and having that model I think is important," she said.
Associate Dean of Undergraduate Education and Director for Health Professions Advising Carol Baffi-Dugan, who worked with Balbach on the CHP Policy Board, underscored Balbach's commitment to her students.
"Professor Balbach always put students first," Baffi-Dugan told the Daily in an email. "She was always there to listen to concerns, critique papers, give honest feedback and great advice, connect students with job and internship opportunities, write letters of reference, offer research roles and be a mentor."
Building connections between faculty members across the different university campuses was an important feature of Balbach's tenure, Martinez noted.
Baffi-Dugan highlighted the value of the strong relationships that Balbach was able to create with all members of the Tufts community.
"She built so many bridges at Tufts that it is hard to map them, but suffice it to say that it helped make the Community Health Program the outstanding program it is today," Baffi-Dugan said. "Professor Balbach reached out to so many individuals - students, faculty and staff - with offers of collaboration, innovative ideas and friendship."
Balbach also played an important leadership role in strengthening faculty recruitment and facilitating a positive work environment, according to Glickman-Simon.
"She always seemed to be able to recruit really good faculty and make the teaching very desirable and competitive among candidates," he said. "She was always flexible and accommodating and was also quite a pleasure to work with. She always seemed to have, like any good leader or administrator, the best interests of the program at heart."
Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering David Gute, who served on the CHP Policy Board with Balbach, said that she worked both to raise the level of scholarship done in the CHP and the details of the educational mission.
Balbach said she plans to move to her condo in Palm Spring, California where she will spend the next year finishing up grant work for the National Cancer Institute. She also hopes to complete a book based on her years as a pre-major advisor at Tufts, to fill a gap she noticed in material available to help students shape their academic decisions once they have arrived at college.
"If you look around there's a lot about how to get into college, about the practicality of college, but there's not a whole lot about how you think about yourself academically," she said. "I thought it would be fun to write something that was reasonably amusing on that point."
She plans to include a wide variety of student experiences, ranging from the student who came to Tufts with one career path in mind to another who changed his majors four times, chronicling the stories of 10 years worth of Tufts students.
Following the completion of her grant work and book, Balbach said her next steps are refreshingly open-ended.
Despite the loss of their veteran leader, the program's faculty says she is leaving behind a strong program.
"Dr. Balbach was a great leader for the Community Health Program and she will be sorely missed," Gute said. "She leaves a vibrant program and one that is indelibly imbued with her spirit and contributions."
