Office of the Dean
“Our mission here at Harvard Chan School is simple, but profound: We aim to build a world with health, dignity, and justice for all — a world where everyone can thrive.”
— Andrea Baccarelli, MD, PhD, Dean of the Faculty
677 Huntington Avenue, Kresge Building, 10th Floor, Boston, MA 02115
Strategic vision
Harvard Chan School is a special place—home to brilliant faculty, students, trainees, and staff, united in our mission to make a world where everyone can thrive.
The School has a tremendous track record of positive impact, stretching back more than a century. Yet as the world around us becomes ever more competitive and complex, we must find new ways of working together.
After an extensive listening tour to hear from the community, Dean Baccarelli introduced an “AAA vision”, designed to keep Harvard Chan School at the forefront of public health research and education.
The AAA Vision
As an institution, we must work to become more:
Agile
Ready to pivot to meet new opportunities; embracing an entrepreneurial mindset; eager to break through boundaries and identify new collaborators.
Accessible
Open to the world; committed to expanding access to both our education and our research.
Accountable
Transparent and responsive to our community; dedicated to the highest standards of excellence; committed to providing value to society.
Early progress and exciting milestones
Initiatives that are helping us build capacity in each of the AAA spheres:
Agile
- We are building an exciting interdisciplinary research collaboration with Harvard Business School, Harvard Medical School, and the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences to address an urgent societal need: Developing new business models to prioritize and incentivize preventive care.
- We have begun a national search for a new Dean for Research, who will be both a strategist and an ambassador, helping us to stay at the cutting edge of public health research and build bridges to new funders and collaborators.
- We have recruited new faculty in exciting emerging fields and we’re building facilities to support their pioneering research, including a Nutrition Research Kitchen to enable dietary intervention trials and an Exposome Lab that will use high-resolution metabolomics to measure up to 1,000 chemicals at once and assess their impact on the human epigenome.
Accessible
- The Office of Development and Alumni Relations has made funding for financial aid a priority—and recently secured $2 million in gifts to support our DrPH students, helping to make this prestigious degree program more accessible.
- The Center for Health Communication is building out a first-of-its-kind program to connect social media creators with our faculty and train them to understand and promote sound science, an important step toward making our research more accessible to the public.
- The Center for Health Communication also recently began hosting the nation’s most prestigious health journalism fellowship, giving us an unparalleled opportunity to build relationships with reporters who can make our research more accessible to policy makers and civic leaders.
- The Office of Education recently completed our first comprehensive inventory of non-degree programs—more than 300 in all. Leadership is working on strategies to more effectively coordinate, promote, and build on these offerings to expand access to our excellent teaching.
Accountable
- Our working groups on finance, research, and education have made their initial recommendations available on the Intranet and are seeking feedback from across the community.
- Our Finance Department is beginning to work with leadership from across the school to develop new financial models for allocating resources, with the goals of creating a sense of shared stewardship, creating more transparency, securing financial stability, and expanding our impact.
- We continue to develop programming through Harvard Chan LEADs (Learn and Engage Across Differences) as part of a commitment to build a pluralistic and inclusive community that lives up to our Principles of Citizenship.