Ashish Jha, the dean of Brown’s School of Public Health and a leading voice during the COVID-19 pandemic, will deliver the keynote address at Convocation Sept. 3.
Jha gained national prominence for his role as White House COVID-19 Response Coordinator and won praise for his public messaging throughout the pandemic. He directed the Harvard Global Health Institute before his arrival to Brown in 2020.
In a 2023 statement, President Joe Biden applauded Jha “as one of the leading public health experts in America” who has “effectively translated and communicated complex scientific challenges into concrete actions that helped save and improve the lives of millions of Americans.”
The keynote address comes after SPH celebrated its tenth anniversary last year, which saw Jha and other SPH officials celebrating the long history of public health at Brown and its future beyond the COVID-19 pandemic.
In a tweet, Jha expressed his excitement to deliver the address.
“I will be talking about how we improve the health and well being of people,” he wrote. “It begins with curiosity, and the courage to admit all that we don’t know.”
He also wrote that he plans to talk about his favorite cartoon in the New Yorker.
It’s a drawing of two cavemen accompanied by the quote, “Something’s just not right — our air is clean, our water is pure, everything we eat is organic and free-range, and yet nobody lives past thirty.”
Ryan Doherty is a section editor covering faculty, higher education and science and research. He is a junior concentrating in Chemistry and Economics who likes to partially complete crosswords in his free time.
