The School of Public Health was formerly the Department of Preventive Medicine of the Medical College, which was established at the founding of the college in 1998 and was renamed the School of Public Health in 2021. In 2006, in collaboration with Zhejiang Provincial Center for Disease Control and Prevention, it was approved to offer master's degree programs and was the first in provincial universities to be granted a secondary master's degree program in "Epidemiology and Health Statistics"; it began enrolling graduate students in epidemiology and health statistics in 2007; in 2010, it was approved to offer a master's degree in public health and preventive medicine, under which there are four secondary master's degree programs in epidemiology and health statistics, occupational health and environmental health, nutrition and food hygiene, and hospital management, and started to enroll undergraduate students in preventive medicine in the same year; in 2018, it became a key discipline in Ningbo City; in 2021, it was approved to grant professional master's degrees in public health.
Currently, the school has 242 undergraduate students, 59 graduate students, and 21 teachers, including 3 full professors, 7 associate professors, and 11 assistant professors. There are also more than 50 part-time teachers from practical bases such as the Zhejiang Provincial Center for Disease Control and Prevention. The school owns Zhejiang Province's "12th Five-Year Plan" key disciplines, Ningbo City's key disciplines, Ningbo City's innovation teams, and Zhejiang Province's "13th Five-Year Plan" off-campus practice education base for university students. It includes 5 undergraduate teaching laboratories and 5 research laboratories. It undertakes the teaching of preventive medicine-related courses for graduate students in public health and preventive medicine, clinical medicine graduate students, five-year undergraduate students in preventive medicine, and five-year undergraduate students in clinical medicine. It has signed practice teaching base agreements with 14 disease prevention and control centers and 14 community health service centers.
The school places emphasis on the construction of majors. The major of preventive medicine was rated as a leading major in Ningbo City and a top-notch major in Ningbo University in 2018, and was approved as a provincial-level first-class major construction site in 2021. It has 8 provincial-level first-class courses, including "Epidemiology" as an offline first-class course at the provincial level, "Epidemiology" as a provincial ideological and political course, "Health Statistics" as an online and offline hybrid first-class course at the provincial level, "Toxicology in Life", "Field Epidemiology" as an online first-class course at the provincial level, "Medical Statistics" as an international offline first-class course at the provincial level, "Community Health and Service Practice" as a practical first-class course at the provincial level, "Occupational Health and Occupational Diseases" as a labor education first-class course at the provincial level; it has one provincial virtual simulation experiment teaching project, which is "Non-invasive Prenatal Testing Virtual Simulation Experiment"; it also has 5 school-level online first-class courses and 6 school-level ideological and political first-class courses. In the past two years, the postgraduate admission rate of undergraduate students in preventive medicine has remained around 50%.
After many years of development, it has gradually formed four research directions: epidemiological analysis of major diseases, big data analysis in public health, pathogenic mechanisms and prevention of harmful environmental factors, and nutrition and prevention of chronic diseases. In the past five years, it has presided over nearly 21 national projects and 12 provincial and ministerial projects, with a total of more than 15 million yuan in vertical scientific research funds, obtained more than 10 invention patents, published more than 200 academic papers, including over 120 SCI papers, won one second prize of Zhejiang Province Science and Technology Award, one second prize and two third prizes of Ningbo City Natural Science Award, edited or participated in nearly 20 monographs or textbooks, and edited 4 English textbooks including "Preventive Medicine", "Medical Statistics", and "Epidemiology".
