Dear Campus Community,
We are very pleased to announce that Michael Lu has been reappointed as dean of the School of Public Health for a second five-year term, effective July 1, 2024.
Dean Lu is a renowned obstetrician-gynecologist and public health leader. He is widely recognized for his research on perinatal health disparities. From 2012 to 2017, he served as director of the federal Maternal and Child Health Bureau. In that role, he led federal programs that served more than 60 million children and families, and launched new national initiatives on women’s preventive services, early childhood home visiting, and safe motherhood. His federal leadership earned him the coveted Hubert H. Humphrey Service to America Award.
Under Dean Lu’s leadership, the school has become bigger, better, and financially more secure. His first term has been devoted to revitalizing the School of Public Health. Student enrollment increased by 16% over the past five years, a change that has been accompanied by the hiring of a cadre of excellent new faculty. The school has become better in many ways, including faculty success, student experience, academic excellence, operational competencies, climate and culture. Dean Lu has also steered the school from perennial budget deficits to four consecutive years of surplus through a combination of improved fiscal management and increased revenue generation, including raising $110 million in philanthropic support.
Throughout his deanship, Dean Lu has provided remarkable and steady leadership in times of crisis. Less than a year into his first term, the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Amidst the worst public health crisis of the century, he rallied the school in answering the call to provide crucial public health leadership to campus, local, national and global communities. A few months later, George Floyd was murdered. In the ensuing national and global reckoning with racial injustice, he supported the Berkeley Public Health community in launching a school-wide antiracism initiative to help the school become more diverse, equitable, inclusive, and antiracist. During his tenure, more than half of the new faculty have come from historically underrepresented backgrounds, and the proportion of under-represented students has nearly doubled in the past five years. Through the recent strike and strife on campus, he held the school community together with his call for community and compassion.
For his second term, Dean Lu’s goal is to scale the school’s impact in the world through innovating, changemaking, and arc-bending, as outlined in the school’sstrategic plan. He has already launchedchangemaker micro-courses to train students to become effective public health changemakers; arural health innovation fellowship that provides full-ride scholarships to upskill 100 rural health leaders to improve, innovate and transform rural healthcare in the U.S.; and asocial impact prize to support student health equity activism in local and global communities. In February, Dean Lu launched an annualJP Morgan Healthcare Conference in Asia to facilitate research and development, manufacturing and co-investment partnerships in biotech and medtech to help accelerate bringing life-saving and disease-preventing diagnostics and therapeutics to market.
We invite you to read more about Dean Lu’s achievements and future plans for Berkeley Public Health.
Dean Lu is known by campus colleagues for his collaborative approach and effective leadership in tackling shared challenges and initiatives, and we are confident that Berkeley Public Health will continue to thrive with him at the helm. Please join us in congratulating him on his reappointment and successes thus far.
Sincerely,
Carol T. ChristChancellor
Benjamin E. Hermalin
Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost