50 Years, One Mission:
Introducing the SPH50 Champions
Fifty years ago, in 1976, Boston University School of Public Health did not yet exist. There were no departments, no alumni, no traditions—only a conviction that a university with a great medical campus in a great city ought to be training people to improve the health of populations, not just the health of patients.
Everything that has followed was built by people.
As we approach our 50th anniversary celebration on November 10, it would be easy to tell our story through numbers: degrees conferred, papers published, research dollars awarded, countries reached. Those numbers matter. But they are downstream of something more important. Institutions do not build themselves, and fields do not advance on their own. Behind every milestone in our history is a person who taught a class no one had taught before, opened a program that did not exist, took an unpopular position because the evidence demanded it, or stayed with a community long after the grant ended.
This anniversary year, we want to name them.
Beginning next week, we will introduce the SPH 50 Champions—50 faculty, staff, alumni, donors, and SPH leaders whose work has shaped this School, this field, and the health of communities near and far.
They were chosen not because their careers were the most decorated, but because their contributions were the most consequential to who we have become. Some are founders whose names are on our awards and our histories. Some are alumni who have held no title here since the day they graduated, yet whose influence on public health has been enormous all the same. Nine are no longer with us, and we honor them with particular gratitude.
We will release the Champions over several weeks organized around different themes:
The Builders: Shaping BUSPH and the Field—The people who established our academic foundation, led our departments and programs, and defined BUSPH as an institution. They built programs, disciplines, traditions, and a school — and laid the foundation on which we all now stand.
Discovery to Impact: Advancing Public Health Knowledge—The researchers, scholars, and innovators who changed what we know about health and how we respond to it. Through their scholarship, they transformed evidence into knowledge—and knowledge into better health.
Public Health in Action: Leading Change in Communities and Government—From neighborhoods to statehouses to national government, these Champions put public health into practice, turning evidence, advocacy, and leadership into healthier communities. This is the “Do” in Think. Teach. Do.
Health Without Borders: Transforming Global Health—Across countries, cultures, and continents, these Champions have shown that improving health requires partnership, humility, and a commitment that transcends borders—a commitment central to this School’s identity from its earliest years.
Expanding the Possible: Leadership, Partnership & Generosity—The leaders, partners, philanthropists, and innovators who extended what BUSPH could accomplish, and who invested in the next generations of public health professionals.
Each week, we will share the names, the stories behind them, and what their work made possible. I hope you will read them. I hope you will recognize your own mentors, colleagues, and classmates among them. And I hope you will elevate the many Champions we have not named—because 50 names cannot hold 50 years, and the fuller record belongs to all of us.
I am mindful that we mark this anniversary at a genuinely difficult moment for our field. Public health is contending with declining trust, widening inequities, climate threats, and global health crises—and with real pressure on the institutions and funding that sustain our work.
This is precisely why the Champions matter. Every one of them worked in conditions that were imperfect, contested, or underfunded. They did the work anyway. That is the inheritance they are handing us.
The next 50 years will be built the same way the last 50 were: by people who decide to act.
A gift of any size in honor of a mentor, a professor, a classmate, or a Champion whose name you see in the weeks ahead can help support our students, our research, and our impact in the years and decades to come.
Fifty years ago, someone decided this School was worth building. Fifty years from now, someone will look back at this moment and ask what we did with what we were given.
Boston University School of Public Health
Source: https://www.bu.edu/sph/news/articles/2026/deans-note-introducing-50-champions