Bloomberg donates to public health school

Hopkins alumnus Michael Bloomberg announced that he will donate $300 million to the Bloomberg School of Public Health on Thursday, Sept. 15. The donation will establish the Bloomberg Public Health Initiative, which will work to improve five focus areas affecting public health: drug addiction and overdose, obesity, gun violence, adolescent health and environmental threats.

The initiative will pursue these goals by dedicating $125 million to hiring 25 additional professors for the Bloomberg School, who will increase the School’s connections to various governmental and nongovernmental organizations across the United States.

The new professors will also be able to take multi-school and multi-departmental positions with the purpose of creating a more collaborative and interdisciplinary approach towards public health research. The goal of this research would be to pioneer domestic public health policy around the five listed focus areas.

Furthermore, the initiative will dedicate $100 million to the Bloomberg Fellows Program, which will offer full-tuition scholarships for 50 Master of Public Health (MPH) students. The MPH students will speicalize in one of the five focuses of the initiative. An important aspect of this program is the fact that these fellows will have the ability to return to their home communities for a year to work in public health.

The remaining $75 million is designated to the creation of a Doctor of Public Health program and a biennial public health summit. This summit will call together Bloomberg fellows, researchers and relevant organizations to share research findings addressing important public health issues.

The Bloomberg School of Health was founded 100 years ago in 1916 under the name “The Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health.” It was then renamed to the Bloomberg School of Public Health in 2001 in order to recognize Bloomberg’s financial support and dedication towards public health research. This gift coincides with the 100th anniversary of the founding of the school.

In an email to the Hopkins community, University President Ronald J. Daniels wrote about why he thought Bloomberg’s donation was critically important.

“Individually and through the Bloomberg Philanthropies, Mike’s unparalleled lifetime commitment of over $1.5 billion has had an extraordinary impact on virtually every part of our university and health system—our campuses, our discoveries, our scholars and scientists, now and for the future,” Daniels wrote. “In fact, there is no individual who is having a more transformative effect on a single institution of higher education in this nation. We are, once again, deeply grateful for his vision and his faith in our university.”

Daniels also emphasized the importance of the donation for the future achievements of the School.

“This gift is more than a recognition of a storied past; it is a potent affirmation of the School’s future, and our resolute determination to tackle—with ingenuity, compassion, and persistence—our most daunting contemporary public health challenges,” he wrote.