The Second Century Initiative’s Return on Investment:
Faculty Collaborations
Erin Fuse Brown: Health Law
Note from the Editor:
When Georgia State University started the Second Century Initiative – predecessor to the Next Generation Program – the institution sought to bring the best and brightest researchers and scholars to raise Georgia State’s profile and reputation for innovative interdisciplinary research and scholarship.
After five rounds of the program, the return-on-investment for 2CI faculty hiring has paid great dividends in scholarship and research. An important part of this is the opportunity for collaborations between faculty members inside the university – and collaborations outside the university.
When faculty members from different fields collaborate, new possibilities for research and scholarship arise. Thanks to 2CI, these new possibilities translated into work addressing problems facing society while boosting discovery.
This series will examine how individual 2CI faculty members have made a difference in research and scholarship at Georgia State through opportunities for collaboration – examples of how the initiative continues to be one of the university’s greatest investments for the future.
Opportunities: Specialization and Collaboration
Coming to Georgia State under the first round of the 2CI program in 2011 fulfilled a long-desired opportunity for Erin Fuse Brown. In some law schools across the country, health law professors are expected to be generalists.
The opportunity to pursue her specific research areas in health law – health care prices, health care regulations, and health law and policy – under 2CI made Georgia State a very attractive institution.
“Health law is a very broad area,” said Fuse Brown, an Associate Professor of Law and member of the Georgia State College of Law’s Center for Law, Health and Society. “Even though it sounds specialized, it could cover everything from public health law, all the way to human rights and food and drug law.”
Through the ability to focus on her specialty – especially as the groundbreaking Affordable Care Act (ACA) was being implemented and challenged– the possibilities for valuable collaborations were incredible.
“Georgia State was really appealing to me because it meant that I could be a specialist within a cohort of colleagues who really were doing complementary research,” she continued. “It meant that I focus deeply on issues related to the ACA and health care costs and have a team of other people to collaborate with when our areas overlap.”
Fuse Brown has worked with colleagues within the College of Law, as well as the Robinson College of Business, the School of Public Health and the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies, to generate important research and scholarship that addresses critical issues facing society.
For example, with the ACA representing a huge change in America’s healthcare system, she collaborated with colleagues at the Georgia Health Policy Center and the Institute of Health Administration to examine Georgia’s implementation of the law, and other issues Georgia faces with the ACA.
With fellow 2CI hire Patti Zettler, an Associate Professor of Law who focuses on the Food and Drug Administration, she helped to examine the regulation of drug prices, another critical issue in the U.S. healthcare system.
Fuse Brown is also part of research under a National Institutes of Health grant, looking at the legal implications of genomic research with Center for Law, Health and Society Director Leslie Wolf.
And thanks to collaborations across disciplines formed at Georgia State, she’s even published in journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine, with two recent articles in collaboration with researchers from Harvard University Medical School’s Program on Regulation, Therapeutics and Law (PORTAL).
“Some of the collaborations I’ve been able to build while at Georgia State may not be at the university, but they have been made possible by the ability to really focus in on this area of health care regulation,” Fuse Brown said.
– Jeremy Craig, Manager, Marketing and Public Relations, Office of the Provost