Spring/summer 2012 philanthropic impact

[ Spring/Summer 2012 ]

This March, Deans Julio Frenk and David Hunter and I traveled to India with several faculty members and friends of the School. For more than four decades, HSPH has been partnering with government agencies, nonprofits, and research colleagues on everything from raising nutrition standards and improving maternal and child health to battling infectious disease and advancing the cause of universal health care. In India, the experience was nothing less than transformative. Everywhere were illustrations of the ways in which one person devoted to public health can change the lives of millions.

Take, for instance, Anita Patil-Deshmukh, MPH ’05. More than half of Mumbai’s 22 million people are estimated to live in slums four times as crowded as Manhattan; Anita has made it her mission to improve their lives. We visited a slum where 12,000 people reside in tiny makeshift houses situated on alleys so narrow that, when walking down the street, you can touch the homes on both sides at once. There’s no public water or electricity.

The children who live here have no birth certificates or medical records: they are the unknown generation of India. Anita and her nonprofit, PUKAR (Partners for Urban Knowledge Action and Research)—staffed by a dauntless cadre of “Barefoot Researchers”—are weighing, measuring, and vaccinating these children, and giving them medical identities.

On my first trip to this land of 1.2 billion people, I saw countless examples of resilience and hope. Our faculty members, alumni, and partners are making a difference—whether it’s a child safe and happy in a temporary worksite day-care center, or a villager getting treatment for a long-neglected chronic disease, or a toddler newly vaccinated against deadly infections.

To everyone who has contributed to our efforts in India, and around the world, THANK YOU! Each one of you is a shining example of how one person can change the lives of millions … and that gives me the most hope of all!

Ellie Starr
Vice Dean for External Relations

New Gift to Expand, Improve Training for Humanitarian Aid Leaders
Newly Created Morningside Professorship Honors Noted Radiation Scientist
A Boost for Gene-Based Malaria Research
Preventing Young Mothers From Dying—And the Ripple Effects When They Do

New Gift to Expand, Improve Training for Humanitarian Aid Leaders

Wars, natural disasters, genocide, and other tragedies in recent years have transformed global humanitarian aid into a $160 billion-a-year industry that employs 240,000 people in thousands of organizations across more than 100 countries. But too often, would-be humanitarians are ill-equipped to deal with the difficult and dangerous situations they find on the ground—armed militias, blocked roads, earthquake-damaged buildings, or masses of displaced people on the move.

Now, a $5 million grant from Jonathan Lavine, MBA ’92, managing partner of Sankaty Advisors, Bain Capital’s credit and fixed income affiliate, and his wife Jeannie, AB ’88, MBA ’92, will enable the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative (HHI) to significantly expand its ongoing efforts to train the next generation of humanitarian leaders.

Under the new Lavine Family Humanitarian Studies Initiative (HSI), 250 or more students a year—up from about 100—will be able to study at the School to learn how to provide aid effectively, efficiently, and safely. Both entry-level students and current fieldworkers will have access to courses, simulated trainings in rural and urban settings, and case studies.

“The Lavine gift will help HSI extend the reach of humanitarian education to an international scale and boost the impact of humanitarian relief by focusing on professional skill building and evidence-based research on best practices,” says Michael VanRooyen, HHI director and a professor in the Department of Global Health and Population. It will also make HSI the world’s largest program in humanitarian studies.

In addition, the expanded HSI will serve as the foundation for a new Humanitarian Academy—the first global center of its kind—that will coordinate Harvard-wide efforts in humanitarian issues and help define a new field

The Lavines decided to support HHI to “give back to Harvard broadly” to mark their upcoming 20th business school reunion.

“Why is a business school alumnus doing this?” Jonathan Lavine asked. “Because cutting-edge management practices are critical in the effort to help systematically alleviate humanitarian problems all over the world. Too often people are asked to donate to the tragedy of the moment on television. But when we found Mike VanRooyen, we were blown away by what he’s doing every day all over the world. He and HHI are involved in groundbreaking and innovative work that will address some of the world’s biggest problems and help people for many years to come.”

Read Can Doing Good Be Done Better? to learn more about efforts to improve humanitarian aid.

Newly Created Morningside Professorship Honors Noted Radiation Scientist

A $4 million gift from the Morningside Foundation will fund the creation of an endowed professorship in radiobiology at the John B. Little Center for Radiation Science in the Department of Genetics and Complex Diseases at Harvard School of Public Health.

Morningside Foundation Director Gerald Chan, SM ’75, SD ’79, studied radiobiology at HSPH in the 1970s with John B. Little, now a professor emeritus. Chan, who came to HSPH after earning an undergraduate engineering degree at UCLA, went on to found Morningside, a venture capital group with investments in both America and China. While studying radiation physics at HSPH, he discovered exciting developments across the spectrum of life sciences. “To me, the mysteries of life provide endless fascination,” he says.

The new Morningside Professorship in Radiobiology is meant to honor Little, who, in a career spanning nearly half a century, has made important contributions to a field that plays a major role in medical imaging, cancer treatment, and nuclear energy, as well as assessing the public’s exposure to radiation from metal detectors and cosmic rays, and preventing the threat of dirty bombs from terrorist groups.

Chan hopes that Morningside’s support will help further HSPH’s objective of coupling laboratory science with the study of health at the population level. “This combination,” he says, “makes the Harvard School of Public Health a unique place that needs to be celebrated.”

A Boost for Gene-Based Malaria Research

A two-year grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, totaling nearly $833,000,
will help boost research at Harvard School of Public Health aimed at identifying
the genes in red blood cells essential for the malaria parasite to survive. Manoj Duraisingh, associate professor of immunology and infectious diseases, working in collaboration with the Broad Institute, hopes to identify those genes most likely to respond to drug therapies.

Malaria kills roughly 1 million people each year, mostly children under age 5 in sub-Saharan Africa. There is no licensed vaccine for the infection.

“The award of this Phase II Grand Challenges Explorations grant from the Gates Foundation allows us to build on our Phase I grant, where we demonstrated the efficacy of our novel approach of targeting red blood cells,” says Duraisingh. “We will now expand and accelerate this research and produce a comprehensive catalog of candidates to help us identify and prioritize the most promising ones for drug development.”

Because the malaria parasite frequently finds ways to resist antimalarial drugs, genetic approaches to study the parasite and validate new therapeutic targets are urgent, Duraisingh says. Instead of targeting the parasite, Duraisingh targets the red blood cell host, which cannot evolve resistance to new antimalarial drugs. Duraisingh and his colleagues plan to identify the molecules in red blood cells that play a crucial role in supporting the malaria parasite, thus creating a “blueprint” of all the genes that could be targets for antimalarial drugs.

The Gates Grand Challenges Explorations grant supports creative, high-risk concepts with the potential to develop solutions to difficult global health problems.

Preventing Young Mothers From Dying—And the Ripple Effects When They Do

When a mother dies during pregnancy or childbirth in sub-Saharan Africa, the impact on the child or children left behind—and on the larger family—can be devastating. Studies suggest that children’s risk of dying before age 10 jumps by more than 60 percent after their mother dies.

A new $2 million grant from the John & Katie Hansen Family Foundation will enable Harvard School of Public Health researchers to more accurately quantify the extent of the problem, tease out the primary reasons that maternal deaths wreak such havoc on those left behind, and develop practical solutions. The effort is unique because no one has ever measured the full impact that mothers’ deaths have in African societies.

According to the latest estimates, roughly 273,500 women worldwide died from complications of pregnancy or childbirth in 2011, mostly in poor countries. “Our hope is that by quantifying the cost to the economy and to society of allowing these women to die, more resources will be applied to really make a difference in saving mothers’ lives,” says Katie Vogelheim, founder of the Hansen Foundation and a member of the HSPH Board of Dean’s Advisors.

Under the new Hansen Program on Maternal and Child Health, HSPH’s Jennifer Leaning, François-Xavier Bagnoud Professor of the Practice of Health and Human Rights and director of Harvard’s FXB Center for Health and Human Rights, and Ana Langer, professor of the practice of public health and director of the School’s Women and Health Initiative founded by Dean Julio Frenk in 2010, are working on a two-pronged effort focused on Ethiopia and Tanzania—two countries where HSPH has existing connections and where the governments are concerned with reducing maternal mortality.

Leaning and her FXB Center colleagues—whose work focuses on protecting and promoting the rights and well-being of children, adolescents, and youth worldwide—will analyze large databases to establish the impact of maternal deaths on children’s health and survival. They will also conduct in-depth qualitative studies to delineate the particular hardships children experience when their mothers die in childbirth, as well as other dire effects on families left behind. “The idea is to create a wider sense of consciousness about the tragic ripple effects of a mother’s death,” Leaning says. “We hope this effort will create more energy behind national and international steps at eradicating maternal mortality.”

Langer and her colleagues, building on Leaning’s analysis, will develop “concrete interventions that can be implemented and evaluated in Tanzania and Ethiopia to mitigate the impact of a mother’s death on the survival of her children,” Langer says. Her group will also train policymakers and program managers in the two countries to implement effective maternal and child health initiatives, and will work toward improving the quality of maternal health care at the community level.

The Hansen gift is key to ensuring that this research moves forward, say Leaning and Langer. In the long term, they hope this new effort will help keep women’s health and maternal mortality at the forefront of the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals, set in 2000 and due to be updated in 2015.