The Institute has been fortunate to have leaders attentive to its purpose.

William Roper, then dean of the School of Public Health, launched the Institute in 1999 "to truly make a lasting impact on the state of health and health care in North Carolina." Of the Institute's beginnings, Dr. Janet Porter, former associate dean for executive education, says, "Of course, this was Bill Roper's idea but he really left Rachel Stevens to execute."

Janet Porter came to the Institute from stints as COO of Columbus Children's Hospital and CEO of the Association of University Programs in Health Administration. She adds, "I am most proud of our team's high commitment to quality programming and to constantly learning about how to do it better. So the constant debriefings and learning from others about how to make our training programs optimally effective was the essence of who we were. I am also very proud of the importance of evaluation and the role that evaluation and designing programs so that there were logic models has played in our success. And I am proud of how well we partnered with others, like the business school, medical and nursing schools. Our ability to work well with others enabled us to really bring the best to our customers."

Stevens points out that the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health was the first to have a practice institute as a structured part of the School. "Besides Bill Roper's national reputation, I think our leadership in the Hurricane Floyd disaster, really only a month after the Institute was named, helped establish us in North Carolina and within the School as an organization that got things done for our public health people in the field." The Institute actually "deployed" to the flooded counties in the eastern part of the state to help with assessments and environmental health control.

Stevens and Porter both recognize the current director Dr. Ed Baker for expanding the Institute and bringing it greater national and international attention while maintaining its service mission to North Carolina.

L-R, William Roper, Rachel Stevens, Janet Porter, Penny Whiteside, Ed Baker.