Key Milestones

A University committee proposes bundling existing courses with new offerings to provide degrees and certificates to doctors, nurses, sanitary inspectors, and local public health officers. The Rockefeller Foundation hosts a summit with attendees from Columbia University, Johns Hopkins University, Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Chicago.

The Welch-Rose Report, a Rockefeller Foundation-funded blueprint for building U.S. public health schools, is published. Due in part to Columbia's unusually interdisciplinary proposal emphasizing engineering and the social sciences alongside medicine, the Foundation elects to foster a school of public health at Johns Hopkins.

The estate of Joseph De Lamar, a Netherlands-born adventurer and financier, bequeaths over $5 million to Columbia's College of Physicians and Surgeons to study nutrition and "provide for the study and teaching of the origins and cause of the human disease and the prevention thereof."

The Trustees of Columbia University adopt a resolution to fulfill De Lamar's intentions by establishing an institute of public health.

Frederick Banting, MD, pioneers insulin treatment of diabetes; the Soviet Union is established.

The Institute is renamed the De Lamar Institute of Public Health. It now has five branches: Epidemiology, Industrial Medicine, Industrial Physiology, Public Health Administration, and Sanitary Science. It begins offering an MS in public health.

Image: New York Times August 22, 1926 page E5 (Proquest Historical Newspapers)

The Institute and the University's College of Physicians and Surgeons partner with the University of Puerto Rico to establish a School of Tropical Medicine in San Juan.

A League of Nations treaty officially abolishes all forms of slavery.

After a typhoid outbreak, professor Earle Phelps, a pioneer in environmental health, contributes to a Department of Agriculture report establishing federal regulatory control of the shellfish industry.

Adelaide Ross Smith, the first female professor, identifies silicosis as a major health hazard to subway workers.

Photo: Adelaide Ross Smith (1916 Wellesley College Yearbook)

Using statistics from the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, Haven Emerson undertakes the first large-scale analysis of births, stillbirths, and deaths by age, sex, and cause of death in New York City.

Photo: Haven Emerson

After years of planning, the Institute relocates to three floors of a new building shared with the city's Department of Health and Mental Hygiene at 168th and Broadway; Mayor Fiorello La Guardia keynotes the dedication ceremony. The partnership supports a long-standing interest in urban healthcare and population-based research; the two organizations share the building to this day.

Allied troops evacuate Dunkirk; the first prisoners arrive at Auschwitz; a landmark study describes experimental use of penicillin on animals.

John Fertig, PhD, becomes chair of the new Department of Biostatistics. Fertig stays for 35 years, the longest-serving chair and mentor to generations.

The Institute helps launch a Department of Public Health for Puerto Rico.

The DrPH is offered for the first time.

Jews confined to the Warsaw Ghetto begin a doomed uprising against the Nazis; a famine in India's Bengal Province kills over 2 million; the antibiotic streptomycin is discovered.

Atom bombs are dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; World War II ends.

A study into the therapeutic potential of compounds in mustard gas is published, the first example of cytotoxic chemotherapy.

The term "Cold War" is coined; the U.S. launches a national program for eradicating malaria; India achieves independence; pilot Chuck Yeager breaks the speed of sound.

Mohamed Othman Shoib of Egypt is the first student to receive a DrPH; he goes on to serve as the World Health Organization's (WHO's) chief medical officer for social and occupational health. Between 1930 and 1965, more than 300 international students earn degrees.

Photo: Mohamed Othman Shoib (left)

Harold Brown becomes official director.

Years before the Peace Corps was founded, Brown creates an innovative program that sends over 200 medical and public health students, including future Dean John H. Bryant, to work and do research in Surinam, Liberia, and St. Thomas.

Norethisterone, the basis for birth control pills, is synthesized.

The first successful mechanical heart is used; former U.S. Army soldier Christine Jorgensen receives the first high-profile sex reassignment surgery.

Ray E. Trussell, MD, an epidemiologist and specialist in health and hospital administration, takes over as head of the School, aiming to fuse social sciences and quantitative research. He triples the number of faculty during his 14-year tenure.

The Institute of Administrative Medicine is integrated into what is renamed the School of Public Health and Administrative Medicine.

Photo: Ray E. Trussell, MD

The Division of Community and Social Psychiatry is established.

Researcher Jack Elinson, PhD, joins the faculty to teach survey methods and a required Social Foundations of Health course.

The School launches a continuing education program for professionals that becomes the most extensive in the country.

The Columbia University Institute of Human Nutrition Sciences is established within the School and soon begins offering an MS in human nutrition.

Professors Elinson and Trussell publish the results of their innovative Hunterdon County Study, utilizing household interviews and clinical evaluations to measure chronic disease. It is the model for the present-day National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, a key source of data on the nation’s health.

Trussell develops an informed consent requirement for municipal hospitals that becomes standard nationwide.

The Division of Sanitary Science becomes the Division of Environmental Science.

Trussell is named New York City commissioner of hospitals, overseeing 21 facilities, and leverages his dual roles to upgrade the public hospital system and public health education alike.

Samuel Wolfe, MPH '60, DrPH '61, later chair of Health Policy and Management, leads an effort to ensure that Saskatchewan proceeds with plans for universal health insurance, paving the way for Canada’s national health plan.

Harlem Hospital partners with Columbia, handing the School responsibility for social services, home care, addiction recovery, environmental health services, and more. A special unit of Sociomedical Sciences monitors and evaluates patient care.

With support from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the School creates a three-year PhD in administrative medicine.

The Methadone Maintenance Evaluation Unit, directed by professor Frances Gearing, MD, MPH '57, is established to evaluate the efficacy of the first methadone maintenance treatment program.

Trussell steps down, and professor Milton C. Maloney, an MPH alum, becomes interim dean.

Professors Ann F. Brunswick, PhD, and Eric Josephson, MCHS, begin their Longitudinal Harlem Adolescent Health Study, the nation’s first community sociomedical survey of teenagers lasting 25-plus years.

Professor of Tropical Medicine John Frame, MD, is on the first team to publish a study about Lassa fever, a virus endemic to West Africa.

Photo: Lassa fever virus (Centers for Disease Control)

After a protracted search, John H. Bryant, MD '53, becomes the School's new director. Bryant, a mentee of Harold Brown, works to build partnerships across and beyond Columbia.

In its fifth change in five decades, the School renames itself the School of Public Health.

Bryant heads up the new Center for Community Health Systems, an interdisciplinary hub linking researchers, medical personnel, and the Washington Heights community.

Barbara Barlow, MD, and Leslie Davidson, MD '78, launch the "Children Can’t Fly" program with the New York City Department of Health; among other things, it persuades the city to require window guards in homes of children under 10. It reduces childhood deaths from window falls by 96% and prompts worldwide adoption by the WHO.

Photo: "Children Can't Fly" campaign flyer (Centers for Disease Control)

With Columbia Business School, the School of Public Health introduces the first joint MPH/MBA program.

Photo: Columbia University Spectator)

A federal grant funds renovation of the space at 168th Street.

Allan Rosenfield, MD '59, heads the new Center for Population and Family Health and soon creates the academic program in Population and Family Health.

Psychiatrist and social medicine expert Robert Weiss, MD, takes over the Center for Community Health Systems.

Professors Zena Stein, MB, Mervyn Susser and coauthors publish Famine and Human Development: The Dutch Hunger Winter of 1944–1945, their investigation of the long-term consequences of undernutrition for 40,000 children conceived and born at the end of World War II.

The Center for Population and Family Health opens the Family Planning Clinic, followed by the Young Adult Clinic in 1978.

The School begins offering a PhD in biostatistics. By the late 1970s, it offers six joint degree programs, the most of any school of public health.

Bernard Challenor, MD, MPH, an infectious disease epidemiologist and the only person to have taught in every department at the School, becomes interim head and the first Black person in the position.

John H. Bryant departs to head the Carter administration's Office of International Health.

Photo: Bernard Challenor teaching.

Robert J. Weiss, MD ('51) of the Center for Community Health Systems is appointed De Lamar Professor of Public Health Practice and the first formal dean. The change marks a major shift in the School's role at Columbia, stepping up as a full partner in university life.

Challenor soon takes the lead on the General Public Health Program and coordinates the joint degree program with the School of International and Public Affairs. In honor of his dedication to building a diverse community schoolwide, the Bernard Challenor Spirit Prize is now awarded to a graduating student each year.

San Francisco resident Ken Horne is reported to the Center for Disease Control with Kaposi's sarcoma; the CDC would later retroactively identify him as the first patient of the AIDS epidemic in the U.S.

The School launches a Health Management Institute with the business school to provide key skills to working health professionals.

Professors Frederica Perera, MPH '76, DrPH '82, and I. Bernard Weinstein, MD, publish a landmark paper in the Journal of Chronic Diseases proposing a conceptual framework for the use of molecular epidemiology to study carcinogenesis.

Photo: Frederica Perera

Stephen Wotman, DDS, a public health dentist, becomes interim dean.

The School partners with the College of Physicians and Surgeons on a popular Complete Home Medical Guide.

It joins with the Department of Psychiatry at the medical school to develop an AIDS research center focusing on education.

Allan Rosenfield is appointed dean and embarks on an ambitious expansion campaign.

Photo: Allan Rosenfield

Barbara Snell Dohrenwend, PhD '56, works on a groundbreaking study on the link between stressful life events and the development of mental illness.

Photo: Barbara Dohrenwend (CUIMC Health Sciences Library)

Population and Family Health faculty member Bruce Armstrong, DSW, founds the Young Men’s Clinic in Washington Heights, the first-of-its-kind adolescent clinic that today serves more than 3,000 each year.

The FDA approves AZT for treating AIDS and Prozac to treat depression; molecular biologist Yoshizumi Ishino, PhD, discovers the DNA sequence of CRISPR.

Center for Population and Family Health faculty member Neil Boothby, EdD, co-authors the book Unaccompanied Children: Care and Protection in Wars, Natural Disasters, and Refugee Movements; it serves as the basis of the U.N.’s refugee policies for children.

Hundreds of demonstrators are killed in China's Tiananmen Square; the Berlin Wall is brought down, beginning the reunification of Germany.

The Division of Health Policy and Management’s Executive MPH Program admits its first class, allowing health professionals to earn degrees while working full time.

Professor Ronald Bayer, PhD, coins the term “HIV exceptionalism” in his seminal New England Journal of Medicine paper, “Public Health Policy and the AIDS Epidemic—An End to HIV Exceptionalism?”

Columbia's AIDS International Training and Research Program in South Africa, led by professor Stein, launches with funding from the NIH’s Fogarty International Center. More than 800 fellows were trained through the program.

NIH researchers announce successful clinical trials of the first preventive treatment for sickle cell anemia; the FDA approves the first protease inhibitor to treat HIV/AIDS.

Professor Wendy Chavkin, MD, MPH '81, of the Department of Population and Family Health, co-founds Finding Common Ground, a collaboration with Boston Medical Center focused on the impact of welfare reform policies on women and children.

Photo: Wendy Chavkin

The Program on Forced Migration and Health is launched.

Professor Joseph Graziano, PhD, becomes the founding director of the National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences Center for Environmental Health in Northern Manhattan.

Professor Perera becomes founding director of the Columbia Center for Children’s Environmental Health.

Photo: National Archives

The School receives a $33 million naming pledge in honor of businessman and philanthropist Joseph L. Mailman, at the time the largest single donation to a school of public health and naming gift to Columbia University. The School is renamed in his honor.

Annette B. Ramírez de Arellano, DrPH '86, publishes the first segment of a comprehensive history of the School, co-written with the late Samuel Wolfe, in the American Journal of Epidemiology.

Photo: Joseph L. Mailman

The School partners in the launch of the Northern Manhattan Community Voices Collaborative. Supported by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, it strives to address growing barriers to care for the uninsured.

Scientists achieve initial sequencing of the human genome; the first resident crew arrives at the International Space Station.

The Columbia Superfund Basic Research Program is established under professor Graziano to investigate arsenic.

Photo: Joseph Graziano

Having long since outgrown its original space, the School moves primary operations to 722 W. 168th St.

Under W. Ian Lipkin, the Center for Infection and Immunity (CII) joins the School as the only Biosafety Level 3 laboratory at Columbia.

The Center for the History and Ethics of Public Health is established in Sociomedical Sciences.

Physicians successfully implant the world's first self-contained artificial heart; nearly 3,000 people are killed in the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Photo: Library of Congress

Sandro Galea, DrPH '03, of the Department of Epidemiology publishes the first study in his extensive research on mental health consequences of 9/11.

The School's research program becomes second largest in the university, behind only the medical school.

Having watched AIDS spread in Upper Manhattan, professor Wafaa El-Sadr, MD, MPH '91, MPA, founds the International Center for AIDS Care and Treatment Programs, now known as ICAP.

Professor Irwin Redlener, MD, becomes founding director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness, a research hub.

A U.S.-led coalition invades Iraq; New York City bans smoking in bars and restaurants; by this point, more than 20 million people around the world have perished from AIDS.

Hurricane Katrina devastates the Gulf Coast; researchers reconstruct the genome of the 1918 Spanish Flu virus, finding it very similar to modern avian influenzas.

Columbia University President Lee C. Bollinger announces that 722 W. 168th St. will henceforth be known as the Allan Rosenfield Building.

The Bank of America Charitable Foundation announces a $750,000 gift to the School's Northern Manhattan Start Right Coalition, a childhood immunization program.

The School becomes home to the nation’s first multidisciplinary doctoral training program in gender, sexuality, and health.

The School's RAISE (Reproductive Health Access, Information, and Services in Emergencies) Initiative is founded, pioneering access to reproductive health services in neglected crisis sites.

Photo: Wikimedia

Steven Stellman becomes research director of of the World Trade Center Health Registry, a study of more than 71,000. It is the largest registry in U.S. history to monitor the health effects of a disaster

Bruce P. Dohrenwend, PhD, and colleagues publish the landmark study "War-Related Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in Black, Hispanic, and Majority White Vietnam Veterans: The Roles of Exposure and Vulnerability."

Researchers create a functional heart in the laboratory; a financial crisis sweeps the globe; Barack Obama is elected first Black U.S. president.

A team of researchers led by professor Graziano publish their findings from the Health Effects of Arsenic Longitudinal Study (HEALS) in The Lancet, including the fact that one in five deaths in Bangladesh can be linked to arsenic in the drinking water.

Professors Quarraisha Abdool Karim, MS '88, and Salim Abdool Karim, MS '88, provide proof of concept for antiretroviral microbicides in the prevention of HIV and herpes simplex virus type 2 in women.

Photo: Quarraisha Abdool Karim (left) and Salim Abdool Karim (right)

The School establishes the Climate and Health Program to foster cross-disciplinary, translational scholarship on the human health dimensions of climate change.

The redesigned MPH Core Curriculum is launched, becoming a model for schools across the country.

Under the direction of professors Jeffrey Shaman, MA '00, PhD '03, and Patrick Kinney, ScD, the School introduces the first doctoral program in Climate and Health.

Superstorm Sandy's swath of destruction includes flooding in New York City; Washington state becomes the first modern jurisdiction to legalize cannabis; 26 children and staff members are killed by a mass shooter at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut.

New York state bans high-capacity magazines and requires background checks for most gun purchases; a bombing at the Boston Marathon kills three and injures hundreds; the U.S. Supreme Court rules that naturally evolving human genes cannot be patented.

Ebola virus in West Africa kills over 10,000; most provisions of the ACA come into effect; the city of Flint, Michigan, exposes tens of thousands to lead-contaminated water.

CII researchers report robust evidence that myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome is a physical illness, rather than a psychological disorder.

The Columbia Population Health Partnership is established to foster collaboration with like-minded corporate partners.

The School launches its Office of Diversity, Culture, and Inclusion.

Dean Linda P. Fried leads the landmark Columbia-Fudan Global Summit on Aging and Health in partnership with Fudan University in Shanghai.

The Global Consortium on Climate and Health Education, a network of health professions schools and programs, launches to advance global health and educate professionals on the health impacts of climate change.

David Rosner, MPH, PhD, and Gerald Markowitz, PhD, provide expert testimony in a landmark case in which three paint manufacturers are found responsible for lead contamination in thousands of California homes.

Hawaii bans the pesticide chlorpyrifos, thanks in part to testimony by professor Virginia Rauh, ScD.

The Center for the History and Ethics of Public Health cofounds Toxic Docs, a public repository of discovery documents related to lawsuits about toxic exposures.

The School launches its program in Global Health Justice and Governance.

Recognizing that food is at the center of many public health issues, the School launches the Program in Food Systems and Public Health.

ICAP is awarded a $50 million CDC grant to conduct an extensive population survey across countries and communities hardest hit by HIV.

After over two decades of research and advocacy from the Columbia Center for Children's Environmental Health, all-electric city buses come into service in Harlem to reduce air pollution.

COVID-19 rages. Experts from across the school pioneer testing techniques and therapies, conduct infectious disease modeling, and offer technical assistance to New York, the U.S., and other nations. Faculty and students support community awareness and vaccine programs.