From disease prevention to promoting equity and engineering a healthier planet: We're on it. In 1936, the School’s departments and programs were part of the School of Medicine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In 1940, the UNC Board of Trustees approved public health as a separate school within the university, and the School awarded its first degrees in 1940. The current departments of epidemiology, environmental sciences and engineering, and health policy and management grew from the areas of study that were in place when the School was founded. These included public health administration, sanitation and sanitary engineering, epidemiology, communicable diseases, child hygiene, vital statistics, public health laboratory methods and preventive medicine. The Department of Health Behavior was added in 1942; public health nursing (now part of the public health leadership program) grew out of the work on the health administration department; nutrition (which began as part of the School of Medicine) became part of the public health school in 1946; the biostatistics department was founded in 1949; and the maternal and child health department was added in 1950. In September 2008, the School was named the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health in recognition of a generous gift from Dennis Gillings and Joan Gillings. Dennis Gillings was a biostatistics professor at the School from 1971 to 1988 and is the founder, chairman and chief executive officer of Quintiles. Joan Gillings was a beloved philanthropist and community volunteer. The $50 million donation was, at the time, the largest single gift in the history of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Overcoming social and health injustices has been an anchoring focus throughout the history of the Gillings School. Faculty, students and staff continue this tradition of working collaboratively in communities across North Carolina to overcome barriers to good health for all.
“From its earliest days, the School has had a strong moral compass,” said Dr. Barbara K. Rimer, the current dean. “That’s why it was a hospitable place for a group of South African anti-apartheid faculty who emigrated here in the 1960s. That’s why Dan Okun (the late environmental sciences and engineering professor) and other faculty members marched for civil rights in that era. And that’s why a great deal of our research was and is focused on overcoming health inequities.”
Faculty members have been coming and going across the world since the School began. For example, Bernard Greenberg, first a chair of biostatistics and later dean of the School, collaborated with colleagues in Egypt and in other countries, and our biostatisticians for years have trained their counterparts in Chile. Today, the Gillings School continues to award doctoral, master’s and undergraduate degrees and certificates to students who take courses on campus or via the Internet as distance learners. The School is ranked the top public school of public health ( #2 overall) by U.S. News and World Report (ranked in 2021 for the 2022 edition).
