Dean Julio Frenk elected to Robert Wood Johnson Foundation board of trustees

Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health Dean Julio Frenk has been elected to Robert Wood Johnson Foundation board of trustees. Frenk has led the faculty at the School since 2009, and is also the T & G Angelopoulos Professor of Public Health and International Development, a joint appointment with Harvard Kennedy School.

The foundation, which for more than 40 years has worked to improve the health and health care of all Americans, announced the appointment January 29, 2015.

The foundation’s press release noted Frenk’s service as minister of health of Mexico from 2000 to 2006, where he pursued an ambitious agenda to reform the nation’s health system and introduced comprehensive universal health insurance, known as Seguro Popular, which expanded access to health care for tens of millions of previously uninsured Mexicans. He was the founding director-general of the National Institute of Public Health in Mexico, one of the most influential institutions of health education and research in the developing world, and in 1998 joined the World Health Organization (WHO) as executive director in charge of Evidence and Information for Policy, WHO’s first unit explicitly charged with developing a scientific foundation for health policy to achieve better outcomes. In 2008 he received the Clinton Global Citizen Award for “changing the way practitioners and policy makers across the world think about health.”

Read the RWJF announcement: Julio Frenk Elected to Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Board of Trustees

Learn more

The Big 3: Getting to universal health coverage

VIDEO Julio Frenk – The Next Stage of Global Health: The Road to Sustainable Development

Dean Frenk urges action on noncommunicable diseases in poor countries

Dean Frenk pushes global health agenda