Linda P. Fried to Step Down as Columbia Mailman Dean in 2025
Dean Linda P. Fried, who in 16 years as dean of Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health has strengthened the school’s mission in education, research, and impact on critical public health challenges worldwide, has decided to step down from her role effective June 30, 2025, Columbia University Interim President Katrina Armstrong announced today.
Fried, an internationally recognized expert on healthy aging, will return to the faculty at the conclusion of the 2024-5 academic year and continue as director of the Robert N. Butler Columbia Aging Center.
Over her tenure as dean beginning in 2008, Dean Fried established the Columbia Mailman School as one of the world’s top institutions for public health education and science. The transformed and innovative MPH curriculum has become the national accreditation standard and includes programs to address global mental health, pandemic prevention, maternal mortality, opioid addiction, health in the context of forced migration, and new health systems for the future. At the same time, the scientific stature and impact of the School has grown, providing cutting-edge knowledge and leadership on topics ranging from climate change to environmental and reproductive justice. The level of NIH funding received by the School has roughly doubled during her time as Dean; the School now ranks third among schools of public health for NIH prime funding.
More than half of Columbia Mailman’s 250 full-time faculty were recruited during Dean Fried’s tenure, producing a new generation of public health scholars at Columbia. With support from the Board of Advisors, the School’s endowment has almost tripled and has supported the creation of 17 new endowed chairs under her leadership. Nine of the faculty members she recruited and mentored have since gone on to become school deans themselves or hold senior leadership positions at other universities. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Columbia Mailman faculty and scholars were at the forefront of the response to the crisis. For her leadership and service on the University’s COVID-19 Task Force, Dean Fried was awarded a 2022 Nicholas Murray Butler Medal.
The many groundbreaking initiatives launched during her tenure include the Lerner Center for Public Health Promotion, the TRAILS AI Lab, the interdisciplinary program on Climate Change and Health, the Brody Center for Population Mental Health, the Center on Innovative Exposomics, and the Butler Columbia Aging Center. In her final year as Dean, she is launching the Community Health Equity Collaborative, a new office within the Columbia Mailman School to foster partnerships with the local community that will develop a novel model for enhancing health equity and better community health outcomes.
Dean Fried is a physician expert in geriatric medicine and an internationally renowned population scientist. She has dedicated her career to the science of healthy longevity, including defining frailty as a clinical syndrome and illuminating its causes, and defining the causes and consequences of cardiovascular disease and multimorbidity, loneliness and disability in aging. Her work has contributed to knowledge as to the bases for a world where greater longevity benefits people of all ages. She has proposed the concept that it is possible to create a Third Demographic Dividend that enables society and individuals of all ages to experience the benefits of our now-longer lives through a life-course approach to prevention—to extend health span and transform society’s social infrastructure to enable meaningful and significant roles for older adults.
Prior to becoming Dean, Fried was the Mason F. Lord Professor of Geriatric Medicine at the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, where she was the founding director of the Center on Aging and Health, the center of excellence for aging research, and director of the Division of Geriatric Medicine and Gerontology. She is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including the 2022 George M. Kober Medal of the Association of American Physicians and the Knight of the Legion of Honour, bestowed by the Government of France.
“Linda has always been guided by a bedrock understanding that improving individual health outcomes requires that we solve the health problems of whole populations. When she came to Columbia in 2008, Linda had effectively reinvented the field of healthy aging—scholarship that she continues today, not only through the Butler Columbia Aging Center, but also through her recent service as co-chair of the National Academy of Medicine’s International Commission for developing a Global Roadmap for Healthy Longevity,” wrote Katrina Armstrong, Interim President, Columbia University in the City of New York, in an email announcement.
“It has been a profound honor to lead this remarkable institution and to help advance our shared mission to help build a healthy and just world. Columbia Mailman is stronger than ever due to all your contributions, and I believe now is the right time for a transition to the next generation of leadership,” Dean Fried wrote in a separate email.