Harvard School of Public Health gets $350M donation
By - The largest donation in Harvard’s long and storied history will bolster the endowment of one of the University’s smaller schools and will place a focus on the importance of public health in an era of widespread healthcare reform and critical needs in developing nations. Gerald Chan, a venture capitalist and philanthropist who received a doctorate from the School of Public Health in 1979, has gifted $350 million to the Harvard School of Public Health, to be renamed the T.H. Chan School of Public Health after his father.
“If one said the largest gift in Harvard’s history, few people would say that it went to the School of Public Health,” said HSPH Dean Julio Frenk, “but that is what happened here, and I think that underscores the centrality of health. Without health, there is nothing.”
The gift will drive improvements aimed at four global healthcare concerns: pandemics including Ebola, obesity, and malaria, social and environmental factors that have negative impacts on the public, natural and man-made crises, and improving healthcare access for communities by improving quality and cutting prices.
