When Lynn Goldman became dean of the Milken Institute School of Public Health in 2010, she found the school’s faculty “beleaguered” by a lack of infrastructure to support their teaching, research and day-to-day lives.
She said she made it her goal to assemble the school’s leadership and determine its “issues” and ways that officials can create a strategic plan for the school’s future. Now, as Goldman prepares to depart her role on July 1 and join the school’s faculty after 15 years at the helm, she said she has been “lucky” to lead Milken during a period of growth as it fully established itself as a stand-alone school in 2011 and navigated the COVID-19 pandemic.
“When I arrived here, I could see it had the potential for that, right?” Goldman said. “And so to some extent, that’s a matter of luck and serendipity.”
A professor of environmental and community health, Goldman joined the University from her previous posts as a professor at Johns Hopkins University and an assistant administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Prevention, Pesticides and Toxic Substances.
During her time as Milken dean, Goldman oversaw the school’s opening of its own building and its separation from School of Medicine & Health Sciences’ shared resources, like offices of development, research and public relations. Under her leadership, the school’s enrollment has nearly doubled, growing from 1,428 students in 2014 to 2,395 students in 2024, according to the enrollment dashboard.
She also initiated a wave of new faculty recruitment, including hiring new department chairs and adding nine new full-time faculty members since 2015, according to the University’s 2025 core indicators report.
Goldman said she noticed Milken was “resource-poor” when she first arrived, which hindered faculty from acting upon their ideas for the school and their research.
At the beginning of her tenure, “a lot” of the school’s research funding came from private donors and foundations, Goldman said, which did not provide enough money for “F&A” or facilities and administrative costs of projects.
She said she worked to improve the school’s resources, including growing its endowment from $1.1 million to more than $130 million, reallocating existing funds to support faculty and bringing in more outside grants from federal sources, like the National Institutes of Health.
Under her leadership, Milken received more than $80 million in donations from the Milken Institute, Milken Family Foundation and the Sumner M. Redstone Charitable Foundation, including an endowed professorship in her name.
“We do have a lot of pride in the fact that people who could have invested their money anywhere because they were not alumni, they were not from here, chose us as a place to build a premier public health school,” Goldman said.
She said NIH grant funding for Milken’s research has allowed researchers to spend more time on their studies and delegate administrative tasks to support staff. The reallocation of existing funds and additional federal funding for research has also allowed the school to build labs and grow the number of departments conducting research from two to seven, she said.
Milken has expanded its research beyond its original strength of health policy, including in areas like developing vaccines for malaria, using advanced molecular technologies to track pathogens and continuing to study HIV/AIDS.
“We’ve basically quadrupled the amount of research, and we’ve changed the kind of research that we do,” Goldman said.
The NIH canceled at least three Milken grants last month — totaling roughly $2.86 million in lost funding — for studies on the effects of HIV on racial minority populations after the Trump administration ordered agencies to flag studies on issues considered to be related to diversity, equity and inclusion.
Goldman said she met with faculty members last week with research funding revoked by the NIH to examine how they can “move things forward.”
“It’s all about this incredibly unfair process where they’re saying that it’s no longer a priority to address HIV/AIDS and minority communities, where people are both either racial ethnic as well as a sexual minority, which is where we have a lot of AIDS transmitting, right?” Goldman said.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Goldman said she led Milken as the school provided a “tremendous amount” of research and support, including guidance on testing, masking and contact tracing protocol.
The school’s faculty developed a test for the virus before the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention provided commercial test kits publicly, supported local jurisdictions, like D.C. and counties in Maryland and Virginia, with their resources and worked with organizations like the National Association of Counties and the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials to develop training and procedures for contact tracing, she said.
Goldman said that she enjoyed getting to know officials across the University she wouldn’t usually work with and learning how aspects of the University function when collaborating on GW’s COVID policies — which included providing input on GW’s mask mandate, advising on testing protocol and managing the public health lab that performed its COVID-19 testing.
“It’s a little different to have really gotten to know the people who run the residence halls and are keeping the students safe all the time in all kinds of ways and that the people who keep our facilities maintained and people who work with the neighbors,” Goldman said.
Goldman said there are still “a lot of broader areas” in public health in which Milken has not achieved a “toehold,” including expanding research on noncommunicable diseases — chronic, long-lasting conditions that are not spread from person to person — weight and health outcome improvements in children and diabetes prevention.
Milken’s next dean will have to decide where to lead the school based on new problems that “well from the grassroots” in the public health field, as well as from their own perspective and interests in the field, she said.
“They’re going to need to work with our faculty, but at the same time, they will be bringing their own point of view and hopefully some strong sense of direction for where public health is going in general, in our country and globally, that they can help to put an imprint on that,” Goldman said.
Faculty at the school said Goldman has been a communicative and transparent leader who grew the school’s academics, research and service enterprises.
Jim Tielsch, a professor and the chair of the Department of Global Health, said the school has “transformed” under Goldman’s leadership through her emphasis on expanding the school’s research, introducing new online academic programs with education provider 2U and encouraging partnerships with local communities, like stationing a Milken epidemiology professor at D.C. Department of Health during the pandemic.
“Lynn really has taken the school from a place where it was a very solid teaching program, doing pretty well in terms of enrollment and really maturing it into a world class, full-fledged school of public health, with all three of the major agendas in place, teaching, research and service,” Tielsch said.
Amita Vyas, a professor of maternal and child health, said Goldman demonstrated “unprecedented” leadership as she guided GW through COVID-19.
“That type of leadership in a moment of crisis, I saw firsthand how she was able to bring people together and to put that entire system and process into place with folks throughout the University,” Vyas said.
Alan Greenberg, a professor of epidemiology, said Goldman has been an “extraordinary” leader who was transparent and available with the school community, including regarding Milken’s strategic and fiscal priorities during meetings.
“Dean Goldman always prioritized our monthly meetings so I could solicit her guidance on the challenges our department was facing, and in between these meetings was available for consultations during nonbusiness hours when needed,” Greenberg said in an email.
Rachel Moon contributed reporting.
