Linda P. Fried

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Linda P. Fried, M.D., M.P.H., is Dean of Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, Senior Vice President of Columbia University Medical Center, and DeLamar Professor of Public Health and Professor of Epidemiology and of Medicine.   A geriatrician and epidemiologist, Dean Fried is a leader in public health, medicine and science who has dedicated her career to the science of healthy aging and determining how to transition to a world where greater longevity benefits all ages.   An internationally renowned scientist, Dr. Fried has done the seminal work that has defined frailty as a medical syndrome, and that has discovered both its causes and the potential for prevention and treatment as a basis for optimizing health for older adults.   She is also the codesigner and cofounder of Experience Corps, a program that has transformed the nature of volunteering by older adults: it is created to bring the capabilities of older people to bear to support the success of children in public elementary schools and strengthen the ability of schools to educate, and is simultaneously designed as an evidence-based public health program to promote the health of the older volunteers.   Now a program administered by AARP, Experience Corps is in 24 US cities and multiple countries, and has been demonstrated to be highly beneficial for all of its goals.  The care of frail older adults and the health promotion effectiveness of Experience Corps provide two bookends to the continuum of health systems – for health creation and care provision-  needed in a world of longer lives, and to build successful longer-lived societies.  She is currently proposing that innovations in societal design to support successful longer lives could provide the basis for a “Third Demographic Dividend”, where societies designed to create health into older age and the opportunities for older age could transform the wellbeing of all.   The author of over 450 peer-reviewed publications and numerous ground breaking studies, Dean Fried was named by Thomson-Reuters, in 2014, as among the 1% most influential scientific minds of the past decade.

Under Dean Fried’s visionary leadership, the Columbia/Mailman School has amplified its impact in bringing science to transforming the health of populations, as one of the US’s leading schools of public health.  Fried has led the creation of the Robert N. Butler Columbia Aging Center, the Lerner Center for Public Health Promotion, and elevated Columbia’s leadership in research, policy and programming for healthy cities.  She has led the School to build the nation’s first program on Climate and Health and to create an interdisciplinary program, GRAPH, that delivers economic evidence on the value of prevention.  She initiated the creation of Columbia/Mailman’s innovative interdisciplinary MPH curriculum that has set the standard for 21st century public health education.

Before coming to Columbia in 2008, Dr. Fried was the Mason F. Lord Professor of Geriatric Medicine at the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, where she founded the Johns Hopkins Center on Aging and Health and Directed the Division of Geriatric Medicine and Gerontology, and led the Division to be ranked as the #1 program in the US.  She held joint appointments in the Schools of Medicine, Public Health and Nursing.   

Dr. Fried is the recipient of numerous honors and awards.   Fried is an elected member of the US National Academy of Medicine, where she was also elected to the Executive Council.  An elected member of the Association of American Physicians, the society of premiere US physician-scientists, Dr. Fried served as the AAP President in 2016-17; she was the first Dean of a School of Public Health to be President of AAP since William Henry Welch in 1904.  In 2004 Fried was named “a Living Legend in Medicine” by the U.S. Congress, and in 2012 she was profiled by The New York Times as one of 15 world leaders in science.   In 2015 she was named to PBS Organizations’ “Next Avenue 2015 Influencers in Aging”, thought leaders who are changing how we age and think about aging in America. Among her awards, she was named the recipient of the 2016 French National INSERM International Prize in Medical Research, the recipient of the 2011 and 2012 American Federation for Aging Research’s Silver Scholar and Silver Innovator Awards, and received the 2018 Lifetime Achievement Award of the International Congress of Frailty and Sarcopenia.  She is an elected member of the Council on Foreign Relations and co-chair of the World Economic Forum’s Global Council on the Future of Human Enhancement.