Julio Frenk
Dr. Frenk became the seventh chancellor of UCLA on January 1, 2025. He also holds an academic appointment as a distinguished professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. Prior to joining UCLA, he served as president of the University of Miami from 2015 to 2024, where he was also a tenured faculty member. From 2009 to 2015, he was the dean of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the T & G Angelopoulos Professor of Public Health and International Development, a joint appointment with the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. He is the first Latino to lead these institutions of higher education.
Julio Frenk served as the federal secretary of Health of Mexico from 2000 to 2006. There, he pursued an ambitious agenda to reform the nation’s health system and introduced a program of comprehensive universal coverage known as Seguro Popular, which expanded access to health care for more than 55 million previously uninsured persons.
He was the founding director-general of the National Institute of Public Health in Mexico, one of the leading institutions of its kind in the developing world. He also served as executive director in charge of evidence and information for policy at the World Health Organization and as senior fellow in the global health program of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, among other leadership positions