A gift to share the transformative impact of public health education
Steve Shama MPH ’74, MD, honors the profound impact of public health education in his life by endowing a scholarship fund.
For Steve Shama, Harvard Chan School was a profound awakening. He didn’t plan to study public health. Shama was a young occupational health physician when a mentor suggested that an MPH would help further his career.
“Medicine, to me, was how do you take care of thyroid disease, or heart disease. You treat a specific thing,” he recalls. “In public health, everything is a story. You do this because people are dying in far off lands, or because communities are suffering in the United States. The classes, the conversations, being with people from every corner of the world—everything was amazing.”
Discovering universal empathy
Shama grew up in Brooklyn, the son of a Yemeni Jewish father who never finished grade school and a mother from Hungary who finished high school but not beyond. He was raised with “a feeling of giving back to the world, even if it was never spoken outright.” At the School of Public Health, that spirit blossomed: “All the experiences you get bring out who you are. Meeting people from Africa, the Middle East, from places I’d never encountered, I realized; they’re just like me. It was humbling.”
The lessons went far beyond epidemiology or statistics. “I learned the importance of empathy, the kind that stretches beyond your own borders and community. To really make a difference, you need humility and universal empathy,” says Shama. This awakening changed his professional life, steering him not just to treat individual patients, but to think about how to improve health on a population level. “The MPH degree is not just facts; it’s an awakening in you of how you can make the world better because you have lived.”
I decided to give because I realized that there were some people who have this beautiful dream to make this world a better and healthier place. They’re passionate about it, but they don’t have the funds. I wanted to make sure that Harvard Chan School had enough funds to do the best they could to attract these people.
A legacy of opening doors
Shama’s medical practice shifted to dermatology, and he began giving talks on empathy. Shama strives to live, as he puts it, “One moment short of a tear.” That means, to focus on topics of impact, that bring out strong feelings in himself and others. And one thing Shama feels very deeply is gratitude for the way that studying public health broadened his worldview.
This gratitude, and the hope to open the world for others as it was opened for him, inspired Shama’s decades-long commitment to financial aid. “I decided to give because I realized that there were some people who have this beautiful dream, to make the world a better and healthier place. They’re passionate about it, but they don’t have the funds. I wanted to make sure that Harvard Chan School had enough funds to do the best they could to attract these people.”
“I give for memories. I give for feelings. If there’s someone out there who can’t attend because they can’t afford the last $5,000, I want to help. No matter how much you give, you do it because you feel that your efforts can make a difference. And the School leaves you with that feeling.”
As for his decision to include Harvard Chan School in his will, Shama says it’s as much about legacy and humility as about philanthropy. “You reach a point where you realize, we’ve left enough for our children—and then, what? We give to organizations that made a difference in our lives. For me and my wife, it’s about ensuring that opportunity continues for others. I hope students see my name and my story, and realize the path is open to them too.”
