Harvard names new dean of public health school
Ex-WHO head, Mexican official to begin in '09
Harvard tapped a former Mexican minister of health and a global health leader as dean of its School of Public Health yesterday.
Dr. Julio Frenk, a former World Health Organization official who is now a senior fellow at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, said he was excited to take over a top school, where he was once a visiting professor.
"It's one of the leading schools in the world . . . and it has an enormously promising prospect with the plan to move to the new campus in Allston," he said in a telephone interview yesterday, referring to plans to move the public health school from the Longwood Medical Area to a site across the Charles River from the main Harvard campus.
"I think that will give a great opportunity to think about what public health research should be in the 21st century."
Frenk noted that his original Harvard connection stretched back to the womb, when his mother and father, who was a pediatric fellow at Harvard-affiliated Children's Hospital, lived in Boston. That connection was cemented in 1987 when Frenk helped develop the National Institute of Public Health in Mexico, now one of the developing world's leading research institutions, with the help of Harvard officials.
In a statement, Drew Gilpin Faust, Harvard's president, hailed Frenk as a "highly influential figure" who, because of his leadership experience and longstanding connections to the Harvard School of Public Health, "holds great promise to serve Harvard well."
In January, Frenk will succeed Dr. Barry R. Bloom, who has spent nearly 10 years in charge of the school.
Bloom said that because of his own background in laboratory sciences, he had tried to bring the school's scientific research to world-class levels.
"I think Julio Frenk is the perfect person to capitalize on those relationships and perhaps be even more effective at bringing not only the school, but the whole university, into becoming a global institution," said Bloom, who has known Frenk for 20 years.
Between 2000 and 2006, when Frenk was the Mexico's health minister, Bloom said Frenk implemented revolutionary healthcare reforms that expanded access to 50 million Mexicans.
"He's really been a visionary in the field of global health and health systems," Bloom said.
"He has taken a kind of moral commitment to creating new approaches that will have a direct effect on providing access to prevention and care of poor populations."
In 2006, when Frenk was a candidate for director general of the World Health Organization, he came under fire from antismoking groups, which criticized a deal he brokered with tobacco companies, under which they donated about $400 million to new health initiatives contingent upon tobacco taxes not being raised.
A leading British medical journal, The Lancet, rebutted the attack in an editorial, endorsing Frenk as the candidate "most talented to lead WHO, technically, administratively, and in terms of his vision for health."
Frenk also defends his record on tobacco.
"As minister, I launched a very comprehensive strategy against tobacco," he said yesterday, adding that a small part of a comprehensive plan had been distorted.
"We had a huge raise in tobacco taxes, complete ban on publicity in electronic media . . . [and] a multiplication by seven of smoking cessation clinics." 