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Runner, professor, researcher: Dr. Russ Pate a key figure in USC public health
April 2, 2010
Russ Pate
This is the first in a series of reports on the people who have shaped the Arnold School of Public Health as it celebrates its 35th anniversary in 2010.
It was 1974, and former Gamecocks head football coach Warren Giese needed an exercise physiologist for the faculty at USC’s College of Health and Physical Education.
Giese, a professor and dean of the college, was in the afternoon of his academic career, and when a lanky, young Ph.D. named Russell Pate accepted the job, it looked like a solid, long-term intellectual investment.
Turns out it was a good call – for Pate, for the University and for what has emerged as Pate’s home at the Arnold School of Public Health.
The creation of a public health school in 1974 emerged a time when the public and the South Carolina General Assembly began to pay attention to the state’s dismal health statistics for infant mortality and life expectancy.
Then Gov. John C. West, much concerned over a shortage of primary care physicians, led an effort that in 1973 allowed USC to apply for a federal grant to assist in the development of the state’s second medical school.
A year later, the S.C. Commission on Higher Education and the State Legislature approved USC’s request to open the College of Public Health and Associated Health Programs.
From his vantage in the College of Health and Physical Education, Pate watched as a public health initiative was cobbled together “from almost nothing. Most of the faculty were already here, and they were just reassigned into the school of public health.”
When the school opened its doors in July 1975, it had a total of seven faculty, a few dozen students and a budget of $500,000.
Leadership issues dogged the school in its first two years, but the appointment of Dr. Winona B. Vernberg as dean was a seminal step in the early history of the school, Pate said.
“Winona was already a well-regarded researcher, and she brought a stature to the school that went well beyond its size.”
In 1989, thanks to Vernberg’s leadership and a corollary growth in academic public health, the school was poised for an important expansion, Pate said.
That year an administrative review of the Department of Physical Education -- coincidentally led by Vernberg – led to the creation of a Department of Exercise Science that, by faculty election, merged into the School of Public Health.
Pate, who was selected as the new department chair, remembers the merger was eerily reminiscent of Vernberg’s public health startup in the mid-1970s. “We had a half-dozen faculty, 70 undergraduate students and 30 graduate students,” he recalled.
Also in 1989, the USC Speech Pathology program (now known as the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders), joined the school, rounding out the organization that exists today.
The joining of USC’s public health and exercise science programs was the first merger of its kind in the country and turned out to be enormously important, said Pate.
“It was at a time when it was beginning to become clear that physical activity was going to be a public health issue. Traditionally physical activity had not been viewed that way,” he said.
The exercise science program has grown tremendously over the years, in no small part because of its affiliation with public health, said Pate.
Today the department counts 30 faculty members, 700 undergraduate students and 150 graduate students.
At the same time exercise science was growing so was Pate’s own reputation as a world-class researcher.
He has published more 200 scholarly papers and has authored and edited five books. His research has been supported by the National Institutes of Health, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the American Heart Association.
A past president of the American College of Sports Medicine, he has played key roles in developing federal recommendations on physical activity and guidelines on prevention of childhood obesity.
A lifelong distance runner, Pate competed in three U.S. Olympic Trials marathons and twice placed among the Top 10 finishers in the Boston Marathon.
He also has served the University when called upon as well. He was the university’s NCAA representative at one point and was associate vice president for health sciences.
Sustained growth across all public health departments led the school to begin planning early in the 1990s for a move to new office and research quarters, Pate said.
Originally, plans called for administrative and faculty offices to occupy the old Carolina Plaza hotel, then slated to be remodeled, and research activities to occupy a new Public Health Research Center (PHRC) to be built next door.
USC decided not to remodel the hotel and imploded it in February 2006. The PHRC opened the following October.
Pate said that there is no underestimating the value of the $10 million bequest to the school from Columbia businessman Norman Arnold, for whom the school was renamed in 2000. “Mr. Arnold’s commitment to the school was an enormous shot in the arm,” he said.
The bequest came at a time when the Arnold School was growing rapidly under the direction of Dr. Harris Pastides, then dean of the school, and positioning itself in the vanguard of USC’s transition to a true research university.
“What happened is that our faculty have steadily raised the bar for research and, in that, we’ve had an impact on the culture across the campus,” he said.
The recession has meant the Arnold School has had to make do with fewer resources and to focus on things that it can do well, “particularly in areas where we can be nationally prominent and competitive,” he said.
“Public health covers a lot of territory. Even the very large programs at Johns Hopkins, Michigan, Berkeley and Harvard don’t come close to being good in every niche. We have to invest our efforts where they can have the greatest impact for the state and nation,” he said.
