Equipping a generation to lead
For William Rom, MPH ’73, Harvard Chan School was a place where he began to see medicine differently—and where his understanding of the relationship between human health and the environment would shape a lifelong career.
“My time at Harvard Chan School was pivotal for me,” Rom said. “The professors were great mentors, and the topics they taught on the environment contributed immensely to my academic career.”
Decades after earning an MPH, Rom continues giving back to Harvard Chan School, by serving on the Alumni Council; supporting the environmental health department; and recently making a $50k gift to the Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment (C-CHANGE). For him, philanthropy is a way to ensure that the opportunities he received can continue for a new generation of public health leaders, and they too can have their eyes opened to the broad nature of the field.
Rom interrupted his internal medicine residency to pursue an MPH at Harvard Chan School, an experience that broadened his perspective beyond treating individual patients. His studies in environmental health helped shape the research and academic work that followed, including his studies of workers and people exposed to environmental toxins.
Rom spent 25 years leading the Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine and Bellevue Chest Service at NYU, including during the tuberculosis and HIV epidemics. He also served as director of NYU’s General Clinical Research Center; spent six years as a senior investigator at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute at the National Institutes of Health; and founded the Rocky Mountain Center for Occupational and Environmental Health at the University of Utah.
At NYU, where he is the Sol and Judith Bergstein Professor of Medicine Emeritus, he has taught climate change, global public health, and environmental health courses. His commitment to educating future leaders has also shaped his philanthropy. Through his foundation, he established the William N. Rom Fellowship in Climate Change and Health at NYU, supporting two graduate students each year as they investigate climate-related challenges. He has also supported climate change policy through a fellowship at the Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs and established a medical student scholarship at the University of Minnesota honoring two professors who influenced his career.
“I believe philanthropy is important to give back the societal opportunities we have received,” Rom said. “There are many deserving ideas, but climate change is the overwhelming challenge right now. Nudging other individuals to give, especially to protect the environment, is important to me.”
That conviction is what drew him to support C-CHANGE. Rom sees the Center as an important model for how climate change can be addressed. “C-CHANGE is the leader in public health schools’ efforts to address climate change through education and research. It is a novel concept that expands beyond a department to an academic program that is extremely multidisciplinary,” Rom said. Rom is particularly enthusiastic about the leadership of Mary Rice, the director of C-CHANGE, whose background in pulmonary medicine and scientific training, he believes, brings a deeply valuable perspective to the field.
The urgency is both professional and personal. As a physician and environmental health researcher, he has spent decades studying the ways environmental conditions affect human health. As a lifelong outdoorsman—a wilderness guide as a teenager, an avid canoeist in Minnesota’s Boundary Waters, and a ski racer in retirement. He has also experienced environmental change firsthand, having lived through wildfires that surrounded his summer cabin, forcing him to evacuate.
Those experiences have strengthened his belief that climate change is no longer a distant environmental issue. It is a public health challenge that will affect every generation. And, with his gift, he hopes to play a role in Harvard Chan School’s approach to preparing the people who will confront it.
“It is exciting to observe this new era of leaders,” Rom said. “From providing financial support to helping edit treatises on global warming, I hope that I am able to help guide us through this climate crisis.”
For Rom, that is what giving means: creating opportunities for the next generation and equipping them with the knowledge to carry this meaningful work forward.
His connection to Harvard Chan School comes full circle. The School once gave Rom the education, mentorship, and perspective that helped shape his career. Today, through his philanthropy and support of C-CHANGE, he is helping ensure that the next generation can build on that legacy—and confront one of the defining public health challenges of our time.
