I am pleased to announce the appointment of Everette James, JD, MBA, to the position of Interim Dean of the Graduate School of Public Health (GSPH), effective upon the stepping down of Dean Donald S. Burke on July 1, 2019.
I am confident that Everette will provide strong leadership for the School during this important transition period. Given the prominence of GSPH, I believe that my successor should have a role in the appointment of a permanent Dean, and therefore a search will commence once the process to identify the next Senior Vice Chancellor for the Health Sciences is well underway.
Everette is the Associate Vice Chancellor for Health Policy and Planning for the Schools of the Health Sciences, the M. Allen Pond Professor of Health Policy and Management at GSPH, and Director of the Pitt Health Policy Institute. His nine-year tenure at the University of Pittsburgh is marked by significant administrative, teaching, research, and service accomplishments. Under Everette’s leadership, our Health Policy Institute has become an influential national thought-leader on the importance of research evidence in health policy making. He established the Pitt Comparative Effectiveness Research Center, which has contributed to more than $80 million in interdisciplinary health services research funding across the Schools of the Health Sciences and UPMC. In partnership with the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, he created the Pitt Medicaid Research Center, which provides critical research support to programs that serve our most vulnerable citizens. Everette teaches the highly-rated core course on Health Policy and Management in Public Health and lectures frequently at the schools of Medicine, Nursing, and Health and Rehabilitation Sciences. He has been the principal investigator on more than $12 million in state, federal, and foundation grants to conduct applied research to inform public health policy. Everette has chaired and serves on numerous external boards and advisory committees, including the Pennsylvania Children’s Health Advisory Council, the Preventative Health and Health Services Advisory Committee, and the American Health Lawyers’ Academic Medical Centers and Teaching Hospitals Practice Group. His commentaries have been published in The New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, and Forbes, and he has authored more than 50 articles on health law and policy. Everette is currently leading our Schools of the Health Sciences’ strategic initiative to increase access to our degree and certificate programs through distance education.
Prior to joining Pitt, Everette had a distinguished career in health care law and in government. He served as the 25th Pennsylvania Secretary of Health and implemented lifesaving public health policies including the state’s first Clean Indoor Air Act and the Health Care-Associated Infection Prevention law. He served in the federal government as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Service Industries and Finance and was later a partner in the Washington, D.C., office of the LeBoeuf, Lamb, Greene & MacRae law firm.
I am also pleased to announce that Eleanor Feingold, PhD, who has made significant contributions as Professor and Interim Chair of the Department of Human Genetics and as Senior Associate Dean in GSPH, will serve as the School’s Executive Associate Dean. She will work with Everette to build upon GSPH’s history of excellence in education, research, and community engagement.
Sincerely,
Arthur S. Levine, M.D.
Senior Vice Chancellor for the Health Sciences
John and Gertrude Petersen Dean, School of Medicine
Professor of Medicine and Molecular Genetics
University of Pittsburgh
3/08/2019