Jamaican Woman Named Dean of Harvard’s Chan School of Public Health
Michelle Williams, a daughter of Kingston Jamaica is to become Dean of Harvard’s Chan School of Public Health.
Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA and is considered one of the most prestigious universities in the world.
The The Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health is also considered a globally significant school focusing on health in the United States.
Williams, a highly respected and admired epidemiologist will assume her new role in July (2016) following a petition by 65 Harvard medical and dental students who call themselves the Racial Justice Coalition. They have been demanding greater diversity for some time.
According to Boston magazine, the group wants to see changes in the university’s curriculum, administration and admission process.
Michelle A. Williams, S.M. ’88, Sc.D. ’91 is a highly esteemed and award winning educator. She is well known for her influential studies of maternal and child health across the globe.
She has co-authored over 400 published research papers and has been the recipient of awards from Harvard, the University of Washington, the American Public Health Association, and even the White House.
Harvard’s President Drew Faust described her as “an eminent epidemiologist, an outstanding teacher and mentor, and an energizing leader and institutional citizen, impassioned about the power of public health to change people’s lives for the better”.
Williams graduated from Princeton University in 1984, where she majored in biology.
She then went on to receive an M.S. in civil engineering from Tufts University in 1986. Continuing her studies at the Harvard School of Public Health, she earned her S.M. in population science in 1988 and her Sc.D. in epidemiology in 1991. After a postdoctoral research fellowship at the University of Washington School of Public Health and Community Medicine, she joined the UW faculty as an assistant professor of epidemiology in 1992.
Emerging as an internationally recognized epidemiologist and educator, she rose through the UW faculty ranks, becoming an associate professor in 1996 and a full professor of epidemiology in 2000. While at the UW, she was highly active in the Center for Perinatal Studies at the Swedish Medical Center in Seattle, rising to become co-director from 2000 to 2011, with broad responsibility for a multidisciplinary research program involving clinical investigators, basic scientists, and epidemiologists. From 1992 to 2010, she held an appointment as an affiliate investigator at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, and from 2008 to 2011 she held a joint appointment in global health at the UW.
Source: Harvard Gazette
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