Michelle Williams SM '88 ScD '91

Introduction

I’m Michelle Williams, and I am the Dean of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. I am also an alumna of the school— I graduated in 1991 with my doctorate in epidemiology, so I’m an epidemiologist. I’ve spent my entire career as an educator in Public Health. To lead this school and to be the head of a school confronting a pandemic at this time has been a privilege and an honor, particularly to represent the scholars, students, staff, and researchers involved.

What has been your greatest challenge in your healthcare career thus far?

As a professional, I think my greatest challenge has been navigating this pandemic as Dean of the School of Public Health. At the same time, it’s what we have always prepared for as public health professionals. We try to educate the public about the importance of pandemic preparedness and response, with many people within and outside of public health raising awareness around the importance of preparation. The biggest challenge is not being heard, and the cost of not being heard is borne by so many families. We’ve lost more than 700,000 Americans to a pandemic that we could have better managed and controlled.

How have you met the challenge of helping those who are “not heard” as part of the Administration of the School of Public Health?

When I became Dean, I shared with a friend that I believe public health is both everywhere and nowhere. When public health is really working and we are doing our best, then we as an entire society— maybe even the world— take public health for granted: when the water is clean, when road traffic accidents are averted, when pathogens are detected early and contained. But when there are failures, such as in Flint, Michigan with massive contamination of drinking water, or when a pandemic happens, we tend to see public health as “failing.” The positioning of public health within a University, within society, and globally is always fraught with being underappreciated and undervalued. So, the way we overcome that is to continue to amplify our voices and to define what public health means.

Being at Harvard has been incredibly helpful and instrumental in this regard. As a  School of Public Health within a massive university like Harvard, we can use our platform to show how public health is so primary to everything in civil society— to education, to economic sustainability and development, to national security —and we are positioned to bring forward innovative ideas that reduce disparities, not expand them. It’s been a way for people to break through this issue of not seeing public health. I like to think of our position as an opportunity, not a challenge: that within public health, especially at Harvard, we use all of our assets and voices, along with all of the trust and confidence that people have in our scholarship, to amplify the message that public health really is at the bedrock of so many advances in society.

What has been one of your happiest moments in your career thus far?

I’m going to answer that in two ways. The most immediate happiness was this fall, when we were able to welcome back our students on the campus. In a way, I’ve never left school: I’ve been in school in one way or another for my whole life. And for the last twenty months, I missed the contact, the engagement, the intimacy with students. So for me, the happiest moment was during orientation week about a month ago, when I walked into that very familiar building of Kresge and felt the building buzzing with energy because it was once again an animated space by the students. It's been twenty long months of waiting for that engagement with students again.

However, throughout my career of over thirty years, my happiness comes along the way of seeing how my past students develop and grow. I love that I am a part of a community of teachers and scholars who contribute to helping other generations achieve their dreams. I’ll just give you an example: last weekend, I received an email from one of my doctoral students who lives and teaches in Thailand. He shared with me that he has finally bought a house; he has his own house for his wife and his child. I can’t tell you how happy I am that he is meeting with personal and professional success. He’s been department chair for several years now, so I’m proud of him there, but I’m even more proud that in addition to his scholarly and academic successes, he is seeing the joy of raising a child and now becoming a homeowner. That makes me really happy.

Who has been your greatest mentor in your career?

I often answer that question by going back to teachers from my elementary and high school and college years. It’s hard to pick a single greatest mentor in my life. Throughout my whole career, I’ve benefited from the kindness and generosity of a number of mentors. There are— and I think in most of our lives, especially for first generation college students like myself— a number of mentors pre-college as well as post-college that would qualify as being great, pivotal people in my life. But I want to answer this question by recognizing someone I’ve thought about frequently during the last year— and that is Richard Monson.

Richard Monson was my dissertation advisor when I was a graduate student in epidemiology here at Harvard. Richard was probably one of the most quiet and humble professors in the department of epidemiology at the time I was a student. If I reflect back on my five years in the program, I think we exchanged less than 500 words. However, he was so wonderfully supportive of my growth and development as an epidemiologist that the words we exchanged, no matter how few, didn’t matter. Because what mattered was what I learned from his example. He was a quiet, brilliant scientist in his own right, but I learned from him not because of the words we exchanged but because of the example he set. Richard is now an Emeritus faculty and I think of him a lot, especially as I navigate being the Dean of the School of Public Health. That is, how to lead by example, and have your actions speak more loudly than your words. Again, there were many mentors in my life that I celebrate every day, but one that I’ve been thinking about and sending out my gratitude to through my actions is Richard Monson. He was just the kind of professor I needed at the time to find my own voice, to develop my own course, and to learn what it really means to lead by example.

You mentioned that you are a first generation student. Could you speak to that experience and what that has meant to you, now serving as Dean of the School of Public Health?

It means a lot. I’m an immigrant to this country; my parents immigrated here when I was seven years old. They came to this country because they understood that the opportunities for education, the opportunities to live without fear of violence or gainful employment, would be important for our upward social mobility. Neither of my parents completed elementary school, so they came with the belief, faith, and trust in the American Dream. They made numerous sacrifices for myself and my siblings, so it means a lot to understand what the promise of this country— of equity, access to education, access to housing, fair employment— truly means. As a first generation student, just a step removed from not having those rights and access to opportunities that some of us take for granted drives me in many ways that I embrace.

I’m proud that I grew up in a New York City public school system that prepared me to achieve at an Ivy League school as an undergrad, and that that Ivy League school opened the door for me to have an advanced degree and come to Harvard, eventually becoming a Dean of the school that I graduated from. That’s the American Dream that inspired my parents to pick up and leave their familiar home, almost 50 years ago, and come to this country. It is a vital reminder for me to live a life of gratitude and appreciation, knowing that one can come from lower socioeconomic status and— with hard work and opportunity, opportunities we sometimes take for granted— can overcome the circumstances of their birth to become a leader of the great Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. And that inspires me. I’m proud of the trajectory that my family and I have been on, and I share the information that I’m a first generation student because I want people to understand what education really means. It's not a cliche: education is the tide that lifts our boat. I’ve helped my own immediate family, and I'd like to think that I've helped countless other families reach their dream because I’ve had the opportunities I’ve had.

What are the greatest challenges in healthcare today?

I think the challenges fall in a number of related buckets. We must confront the threat that climate change poses to our way of life. We have to understand and appreciate that now is the time to act, to mitigate the harms that climate change is having on human health and on communities’ resilience and capacity to thrive. We also have to appreciate— and I believe the pandemic made this even more clear for people who might not have been attuned to it— that inequity is a threat to all of us. Because of the pandemic, we have become more conversant in the language of making inequity clear and more visible to people. But as we do that, we must also commit ourselves to attenuating those disparities and dealing with inequity and injustice simultaneously. And so in public health, because climate change and inequality collide and make all of us vulnerable, as we are seeing and living in it right now, the challenge is to avoid slipping back into complacency. We must be attuned, attentive, and aware of the fact that the decisions we make now will have an impact on the resilience and sustainability of communities across the board. So I believe our message is to stay vigilant, to remain as collaborative as we have been forced to be because of the pandemic, and to continue looking for ways to position vulnerable populations and pivot them towards a more resilient trajectory. So, in a word, we must avoid becoming complacent as we get ourselves out of this pandemic. Let us be attentive to the most persistent threats to our communities— and those are climate [change] and inequity.

I also want to be really precise that healthcare is important, but community health, promotion, and disease prevention happens upstream of healthcare. One of the things we talk about in public health is how important it is for us to position communities and families to protect, promote, and preserve health and wellness. And we do that upstream of the healthcare system, per say. In other words, let’s allow kids to grow and thrive by doing the things in the communities to protect and promote and preserve their health and wellness. But let’s also make sure that we have equitable, just, and robust healthcare systems because we all need healthcare at some point in our lives.

Michelle Williams

Dean of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health

SM 1988

ScD 1991

Interviewed and compiled by Christine Lee

Edited by Felicia Ho