In May, Washington University in St. Louis announced a historic $200 million gift from the Bursky Family Foundation to bolster its new School of Public Health. The commitment – the largest in university history – was made by board chair Andrew M. Bursky and his wife Jane, both alumni and dedicated WashU supporters.
Leaders within the newly named Andrew M. and Jane M. Bursky School of Public Health, including its dean, physician Sandro Galea, believe the investment will empower the school to lean into its vision of building a world-class, research-intensive institution with a real commitment to local and global impact. “We aim to build the partnerships and structures that enable us to contribute to improving the health of populations,” Galea says.
With the new funding, the Bursky School will be able to hire faculty and create scholarships and new research initiatives, all while advancing a broader effort to rethink how public health is taught, studied, and applied. Much of this is influenced by the fact that the Bursky School is the first of its kind to be established since the COVID-19 pandemic.
Since 2020, public health has faced emerging threats, rising chronic disease, declining vaccination rates, and gaps in access to care. Galea says this is exactly the time to build one of the leading schools of public health in the country – and there’s no better place to do it than in St. Louis. “St. Louis is one of the few places in the country where you can walk out the door and be in both Americas: a dense urban core and, an hour away, farm communities facing an entirely different set of health challenges,” he says…