From left: Daniel Merrigan, Dean Adnan Hyder, Alexa Beiser, Les Boden, Howard Cabral, and Alan Sager pose together in the Dean’s Office. Photo: Megan Jones
SPH at 50:
A Q&A with the School’s Longest-Serving Faculty
As the School of Public Health celebrates its 50th anniversary, five faculty reflect on what has—and has not—changed over the course of more than 40 years as members of the SPH community.
The five longest-serving faculty currently at the School of Public Health have all been members of the SPH community for 40 years or more. Their combined expertise—spanning workforce development, health policy and reform, biostatistics and data science, occupational health, and clinical research design—mirrors the breadth and depth of the SPH community today. Between them, they have logged over 200 years at SPH, and have looked on as the School has transformed from a part-time professional MPH program into a top-10 institution with a wide variety of masters and doctoral programs.
After serving as a Jesuit priest for 20 years, Daniel Merrigan (SPH’82,Wheelock’84) took a part-time job as a research assistant at SPH. He earned his MPH from SPH and then his PhD in public health education from Boston University. He then joined the faculty of the Social & Behavioral Sciences Department (now the Department of Community Health Sciences) in 1984. As an associate professor of social and behavioral sciences for the past 42 years, he launched and helps to run innovative workforce development and leadership programs rooted in community collaboration.
Alan Sager joined SPH as an associate professor of health services several years after notably designing a “time banking” method of mobilizing voluntary aid for disabled citizens. He continues to promote health reform and equitable access through economics and policy design throughout his career at SPH as a professor of health law, policy and management.
Howard Cabral (SPH’86,’98) was accepted to SPH as a part-time MPH student to study epidemiology and biostatistics. After graduating, he took a job at SPH’s Data Coordinating Center—now the Biostatistics and Epidemiology Data Analytics Center (BEDAC). He went on to earn his PhD in biostatistics from BU and become a member of SPH’s faculty in 1998. Over the course of his career, he has created methodological advances in clinical trials and developed risk prediction tools cited thousands of times worldwide. He is also a prolific peer reviewer—among the top 1% of peer reviewers in clinical medicine.
Alexa Beiser (CAS’85) completed her PhD in mathematics at Boston University and joined the Department of Biostatistics at SPH. She helped to establish the joint PhD program in biostatistics and served as the lead biostatistician for the Framingham Heart Study (FHS) neurology group for 25 years. She continues to pioneer statistical methods in neurological research today as head of the FHS neurology group data management team and a professor of biostatistics at SPH.
Les Boden became the fourth faculty member in the Department of Environmental Health. As a professor of environmental health, he examines occupational health’s economic and human consequences, connecting workplace safety to public health outcomes. Most recently, he documented the connection between occupational injuries, opioid use disorder, and overdose mortality.
In conversations marking SPH’s 50th anniversary, these five faculty leaders reflected on the School’s evolution: how the student body shifted from working professionals to recent graduates, how public health itself broadened its focus from individual behavior change to systems thinking and social determinants, and how the field has grown both more interdisciplinary and more polarizing. Yet across decades of change, they say that something fundamental has remained: SPH’s unwavering commitment to its founding principle that public health is for everyone.
SPH spoke with Alexa Beiser, Les Boden, Howard Cabral, Daniel Merrigan, and Alan Sager to discuss their four decades of institutional memory, transformation, what is yet to come and what should endure.
Source: https://www.bu.edu/sph/news/articles/2026/sph-at-50-a-qa-with-the-schools-longest-serving-faculty