Thriving Through Turbulent Times

Dr. Ron Brookmeyer’s tenure as UCLA Fielding dean officially started during a once-in-a century global pandemic, and it didn’t get easier from there. Yet as he steps down from the role, the school is in a stronger position than ever before.

DEAN RON BROOKMEYER WITH DR. JAMES MACINKO, FSPH ASSOCIATE DEAN FOR RESEARCH, AND DR. ERICA PAN, DIRECTOR AND STATE PUBLIC HEALTH OFFICER FOR THE CALIFORNIA DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC HEALTH, AT THE 2026 FSPH RESEARCH, INNOVATION & IMPACT DAY

His appointment as dean of the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health coincided with the onset of a global public health crisis like no other experienced in the last 100 years. His tenure concluded during a previously unthinkable assault on core public health principles, along with unprecedented threats to funding for university research.  

BROOKMEYER AT 2025 UNDERGRADUATE CAPSTONE EVENT.

Dr. Ron Brookmeyer, who decided to step down as of June 30, 2026, after eight years leading the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, had many goals when he accepted the formal position in January 2020 after 14 months as interim dean. But one was overarching. “I wanted to leave the school in a better place than I found it,” says Brookmeyer, who will now focus full time on research and teaching in his role as a distinguished professor in UCLA Fielding’s Department of Biostatistics.  

As a renowned biostatistician, Brookmeyer’s expertise includes his ability to make sense of numbers, often in the face of uncertainty. But as it pertains to his time as dean, the data are unequivocal: Despite extraordinary challenges, the school has never been stronger or more impactful.  

UCLA Fielding’s faculty has grown in both size and reputation, consistently ranking among the campus leaders in per capita extramural research funding. Thanks to generous supporters, the number of FSPH endowed chairs has tripled during Brookmeyer’s tenure— providing a critical and enduring tool for recruiting and retaining top faculty and giving them flexibility in their academic pursuits.  

BROOKMEYER WITH FACULTY MEMBERS DRS. YIFANG ZHU AND THE LATE STEVEN WALLACE AT THE 2019 LESTER BRESLOW DISTINGUISHED LECTURE.

The school’s student body has increased by nearly 50%, in part through the development of several new academic programs. Brookmeyer led the effort to reinstate the popular undergraduate Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Science majors in public health at UCLA, significantly expanding UCLA Fielding’s footprint on the campus and bolstering its future impact in communities. He worked tirelessly to improve the physical infrastructure of the school while championing the development and launch of a new FSPH website. And Brookmeyer’s leadership across the wider UCLA community included chairing the campus-wide COVID-19 Future Planning Task Force, which provided evidence-based guidance to the university during the unfolding pandemic.

WITH FACULTY MEMBERS DRS. GILBERT GEE (LEFT), TOM BELIN (SECOND FROM LEFT), AND SUDIPTO BANERJEE (RIGHT) AT THE 2025 FSPH COMMENCEMENT CEREMONY.

The Council on Education for Public Health (CEPH) — the independent U.S. agency that accredits schools of public health — awarded UCLA Fielding the highest scores possible on more than 120 criteria during FSPH’s most recent accreditation review. Meanwhile, the school has steadily improved in U.S. News & World Report’s national Best Public Health Schools list, climbing from 11th at the start of Brookmeyer’s tenure to its 2026 ranking of tied for sixth in the country among the 224 public health schools and programs CEPH accredits.

But in this case, the data don’t tell the complete story. Those who have worked closely with Brookmeyer during his tenure laud the collegiality he built at the school through his leadership style. “Ron promoted a transparent environment in which faculty, staff, and students felt heard and respected,” says Dr. May Wang, former chair of the school’s Faculty Executive Committee. “He has a special gift for active listening, which was tremendously helpful for the school as it navigated through some unprecedented challenges.”  

WITH FACULTY MEMBER DR. JONATHAN FIELDING AT 2018 HOLIDAY OPEN HOUSE EVENT.

Brookmeyer came to UCLA Fielding in 2010 with no intention of ascending to an administrative leadership role. In nearly three decades on the faculty at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, he had earned acclaim for research that combined statistics, epidemiology, and information sciences to develop models projecting the future magnitude of major public health problems. As a researcher at Johns Hopkins in the early days of the AIDS epidemic, Brookmeyer co-authored a landmark 1986 paper in The Lancet accurately projecting that, given the HIV virus’s long incubation period, the 27,000-plus cases reported up to that point represented the tip of the iceberg. By the time he arrived at UCLA Fielding, Brookmeyer was immersed in work that would draw worldwide attention through its projection that the number of Alzheimer’s cases in the U.S. would nearly quadruple in the first half of the 21st century.

But in 2018, as campus leaders began the national search for a new FSPH dean, they approached Brookmeyer, who had run Johns Hopkins’ interdepartmental Master of Public Health program from 2002 to 2008. “I knew from that experience that I could bring people from different departments and disciplines together toward a common purpose,” Brookmeyer says of his decision to accept the offer to become interim dean.  

In December 2019, Brookmeyer received a call from the UCLA provost informing him that he had been selected as the school’s permanent dean. Brookmeyer was in China at the time, teaching workshops at the invitation of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention alongside Dr. Roger Detels, FSPH distinguished professor of epidemiology, whose relationship with Brookmeyer dated back to the earliest days of the Multicenter AIDS Cohort Study, or MACS (Detels headed the UCLA site and Brookmeyer worked at the Hopkins site).  

By the time Brookmeyer’s appointment was announced, in January 2020, it was becoming clear that an outbreak in China the previous month was beginning to spread rapidly across Asia and beyond. And so, as Brookmeyer’s official term as UCLA Fielding dean began, public health was thrust into the spotlight like never before.

The school moved proactively to help both the campus and the broader community understand what was unfolding and what public health measures were called for — although, as Brookmeyer notes, “There was no manual for what to do. The data were still coming in.”  
     

On Feb. 10, 2020, when barely more than a dozen cases had been identified in California, UCLA Fielding co-hosted “The Novel Coronavirus: What Do We Know and What’s Next?” With the UCLA Center for Chinese Studies, Brookmeyer moderated a panel that included three FSPH faculty members — Detels, Dr. Anne Rimoin, and Dr. Zuo-Feng Zhang — as well as Dr. Alex Wang from the UCLA School of Law and Dr. Otto Yang from the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine. The event, which drew an overflow crowd as well as a significant audience online, foretold the school’s leadership on the issue. As early as mid-January, FSPH faculty experts were positioned as key sources in local, national, and international news media coverage of the outbreak, a role that would continue throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, giving the school a level of visibility far disproportionate to its size.  

As chair of the campuswide COVID-19 Future Planning Task Force, Brookmeyer brought together disparate campus stakeholders to determine how the university should respond in the face of evolving data. “It’s all about balancing risk, and there were many trade-offs to consider — which is something we as public health experts are trained to do,” he says. “We had different groups providing their subject-matter expertise and the idea was to piece the data together and reach a consensus … then be prepared to pivot as new information came in.”

BROOKMEYER WITH FACULTY MEMBER AND FORMER DEAN DR. ROGER DETELS AT THE 2023 RESEARCH, INNOVATION & IMPACT DAY

“Dean Brookmeyer led this school through a time of crisis when the world grew especially aware of the importance of the field of public health,” says Dr. Darnell Hunt, UCLA executive vice chancellor and provost. “His leadership and expertise were invaluable in helping UCLA navigate through uncharted territory.”

Brookmeyer stayed on as chair of the task force until September 2020 as the campus completed preparations for the fall quarter, then stepped aside to turn his full attention to his role as dean. Among the first major projects was to work with faculty and staff to develop and adopt UCLA Fielding’s 2021 Strategic Plan. That document, along with its 2024 update, laid out a vision for the school that promoted critical areas central to public health in the next decade, including infectious diseases; climate change; data science and artificial intelligence; health equity; and communicating public health.

Guided by these and other priorities, Brookmeyer oversaw a process involving department chairs and faculty search committees that recruited 43 full-time equivalent (FTE) faculty to the school, including 10 that represented new positions. The faculty recruits since 2018, comprising more than half of UCLA Fielding’s 79 FTE positions, have strengthened and in some cases expanded the school’s expertise in areas such as climate change, maternal and child health, aging, AI, and data science, among others. Moreover, Brookmeyer says, “when faculty come in with impactful work and ideas, it brings new energy and vitality to the school.”

The school’s expanded impact is also represented by the new degree programs. These include the Master of Healthcare Administration and Master of Data Science in Health, both of which provide new educational routes for non-traditional students looking to build on their public health training through online and hybrid platforms.

Among the crowning achievements during Brookmeyer’s tenure was the reinstatement, after more than 40 years, of an undergraduate public health degree program at UCLA. Brookmeyer worked closely with Dr. Kyle McJunkin, assistant dean for academic programs; FSPH’s Faculty Executive Committee chair at the time, Dr. Catherine Sugar; and other faculty members over the course of multiple years before the program, which offers Bachelor of Science and Bachelor of Arts degrees in public health, gained the approval of the UCLA Academic Senate in 2022. The program has been an unqualified success, with public health ranking in the top 15 out of more than 140 majors high school seniors select from when applying to UCLA. “It’s been heartening to work with so many passionate students who feel strongly about health equity and want to work in a multidisciplinary fashion to make an impact in communities,” Brookmeyer says.

His observations come from direct experience: For the last three years, Brookmeyer has taught the required biostatistics course for undergraduate public health majors. “Successful teaching involves empathy — putting yourself in the student’s shoes, hearing what you’re saying from their perspective, and recognizing that everyone has a different learning style and there’s not only one way to teach,” Brookmeyer says.  “Finding the best ways to reach individual students and seeing the excitement in their eyes as they learn is as rewarding as it gets.”

Another top priority for Brookmeyer was to revamp the school’s physical space and infrastructure — bringing not only a more inviting aesthetic, but also a sense of identity for the school as well as an impetus for interaction and collaboration. The student-centric overhaul included establishing the school’s first common area, the Public Health Community Space, where students can collaborate and study on the first floor; and moving the Admissions and Student Services offices from the basement level to new, renovated offices on the first floor. Digital screens were placed in the lobby for announcements about FSPH events, and Brookmeyer commissioned a design firm to create two vibrant murals along the school’s main corridor, illustrating the contributions of public health and UCLA Fielding. From there, Brookmeyer championed work on other floors, including more than two dozen renovated or new faculty and staff offices, a new FSPH conference room, the first new FSPH classroom in decades, an upgrade in IT, and updated audiovisual capabilities in lecture halls and conference rooms.  

During Brookmeyer’s tenure, UCLA Fielding has also greatly increased its communications efforts, most notably through the launching of the new school website. During major public health events, FSPH faculty are increasingly turned to by news media, policymakers, and others for their expertise. Brookmeyer also established, along with Associate Dean for Research James Macinko, the FSPH Research Innovation & Impact Day, first held in April 2023 and reprised in April 2026, to showcase the work of faculty to the broader community.

The critical importance of public health to the welfare of populations both at home and around the world has been reinforced time and again during Brookmeyer’s tenure as dean — whether through COVID and other infectious disease outbreaks; environmental disasters and the growing threat of climate change; or the increased attention to health promotion, health policy, and community-based strategies to address health inequities. “History teaches us that there will always be public health crises,” Brookmeyer says. “The challenge is to make sure our society appreciates and invests in public health between those crises, because we know how to make an impact when we have the proper resources and support.”  

L. TO R.: FACULTY MEMBER AND FORMER DEAN DR. ABDELMONEM A. AFIFI; DR. BARBARA FERRER, DIRECTOR OF THE LOS ANGELES COUNTY DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC HEALTH; DEVRA BRESLOW; AND BROOKMEYER AT THE 2019 LESTER BRESLOW DISTINGUISHED LECTURE.

As he concludes his time at the helm of UCLA Fielding, Brookmeyer is confident that the school is well positioned to play an ever-increasing role in these efforts. “We have terrific faculty and staff, and we have built programs that will continue to attract top students who will be public health leaders in the future,” he says. “It’s been an honor to have had the opportunity to work with colleagues in taking us to this point, and now I am excited to see the great accomplishments for UCLA Fielding in the years to come.”