About Us

Award-winning TIME Magazine science editor and health writer Claudia Wallis has joined the Mailman School as Associate Dean for Strategic Communications. The creation of this new position reflects a conviction on the part of Dean Linda Fried and the Mailman leadership that effective communication lies at the heart of any public health effort and at the heart of educating the next generation of public health leaders.

Ms. Wallis has authored some of TIME’s most iconic articles, including bestselling cover stories on autism, cholesterol, estrogen, the adolescent brain, obesity, and “The Science of the Happiness.”  Her work has also appeared in the New York Times, Rolling Stone, Parade, CNN.com, and Fortune. Her writing has won awards from the American Psychiatric Association, the Susan G. Komen Foundation, the Education Writers Association, and the American Society of Magazine Editors, among others.

In addition, Ms. Wallis has appeared numerous times on such national television shows as Good Morning America, the Today Show, Charlie Rose, and on National Public Radio, and she has been an invited speaker on college campuses.  Finally, she was the founding editor of Time for Kids magazines, which reach nearly 4 million U.S. school children. Ms. Wallis is a summa cum laude graduate of Yale and a recent fellow at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism.

The new Associate Dean is passionate about public health and believes that smart, high-impact communication provides an essential link between the worlds of research, policy, education and the general public. She hopes to use her communication skills to tell the Mailman story in every medium, to distinguish it among schools of public health, and position it as the leading voice on the critical public health debates of our day.