Welcome to The Healthy Turtle!

A letter from Dr. Robert S. Gold, Dean of the School of Public Health:

Friends,

In the hopes of creating a better sense of community for our school, we are excited to announce the launch of "The Healthy Turtle," a blog intended to foster conversation and interaction among the students, faculty, staff, students and friends of the School of Public Health. "The Healthy Turtle" is located at http://sphumd.blogspot.com/.

Weblogs, or "blogs," have risen in prominence in the last few years, providing organizations like the School of Public Health the opportunity to publish features and commentary and build a genuine online community. Launching this blog gives us a new way to share our story with others, and highlights the incredible men and women who work and learn here.

For those familiar with our Web site, we already keep plenty up to date with news and calendar items. With that in mind, The Healthy Turtle is meant to be more conversational and casual, allowing the personality of our community to come through.

We want The Healthy Turtle to serve as a meeting space for those connected with the school, allowing us to interact, share information and ideas, and learn from each other in new ways. For this to happen, we need to hear your stories, ideas, and talents. See our post entitled Upcoming Features: Participate in the Healthy Turtle to find out what you can do to be involved.

Also, if you have any ideas for the blog, stories or features you'd like see, or any feedback you'd like to give, we'd love to hear it. Email rmcmahon@umd.edu to share your thoughts.

I encourage you to participate in this new project, and I'm excited to see where The Healthy Turtle will go. Thank you, and I look forward to talking with you again soon.

Sincerely,
Dean Robert S. Gold.