The Board of Trustees of Columbia University has established the Julius B. Richmond Professor of Health Policy and Aging at the Mailman School of Public Health and named Dr. John (Jack) W.  Rowe, its first endowed incumbent. Dr. Rowe is a nationally recognized healthcare leader whose career has spanned across science, academia, public policy, and health care management.

[Photo: Dr. John (Jack) W.  Rowe]

Dr. Richmond was a U.S. Surgeon General, the first national director of the Head Start Program, and a longtime professor of health policy at the Harvard School of Public Health. This is the first endowed chair that is housed in the Mailman School’s department of health policy and management.

Dr. Rowe, the former CEO of Aetna,  previously served as President and CEO of Mount Sinai Medical School and Medical Center and of Mount Sinai NYU Health. In the first phase of his career, he helped establish  the fields of geriatrics and medical gerontology, receiving tenure as a young academic at the Harvard Medical School.  More recently, and since joining the Mailman School’s department of health policy and management eight years ago, he has led the critical effort to create policies and institutions that are responsive to an increasingly aging society, while simultaneously serving as one of the nation’s leading voices on health reform and the transformation of the U.S. health system more generally. Dr. Rowe currently leads the MacArthur Foundation’s Network on an Aging Society. In 2013 Harvard Business Review evaluated the performance of 2,000 CEOs in all industry and ranked Dr. Rowe at number 40 and first among those in the healthcare services and healthcare finance sector.