Klag Named Dean-Designate of Bloomberg School of Public Health

Michael J. Klag, an internationally known expert on the epidemiology and prevention of heart and kidney disease and a Johns Hopkins faculty member since 1987, has been appointed dean-designate of the university’s Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Klag, a physician who earned his master of public health degree from the school in 1987, will succeed Dean Alfred Sommer on Sept. 1. Sommer, the dean since 1990, will remain active in research and in programs to improve global health and prevent blindness.

Michael J.Klag, MD, MPH

“Dr. Klag is the right leader to write a new chapter in the history of the world’s oldest, largest and most prominent school of public health,” said William R. Brody, president of the university, who recommended Klag’s appointment to the executive committee of the board of trustees.

“His command of national a nd global issues of public health, his passionate commitment to public health education and his collaborative spirit make him ideally suited to build on the extraordinary work of his predecessors, Al Sommer and D.A. Henderson,” Brody said. “He will outline a vision for global leadership in public health and ensure that the school’s faculty and students have the resources needed to execute that vision.”

The Bloomberg School, established in 1916, was the first school of its kind in the world and is a leading international resource for global health. It conducts research in more than 50 countries and has 469 full time faculty and 14,500 alumni, many of whom serve in leadership positions in ministries of health, the World Health Organization and other agencies and organizations.

"I feel enormously privileged to lead an institution so critically important to the world's health," Klag said. “If you’re interested in public health, there’s no better institution than the Bloomberg School.

“It is humbling to follow in the footsteps of the people who have been deans of this school,” he said, “from Al and D.A. back to William Henry Welch, who was the first dean of both the School of Medicine and the School of Public Health. His imprint has been on the school from the start. Wired into our DNA is his vision of international scope, an emphasis on research and a focus on mentorship and teaching.”

Sommer said he has known Klag since the new dean came to Johns Hopkins in 1984 and began study at what was then known as the School of Hygiene and Public Health.

"He is a great leader, an outstanding researcher and clinician, and he understands the synergies between public health and medicine,” Sommer said. “Michael has the vision and experience to lead the Bloomberg School into the future."

Klag, 52, is the David M. Levine Professor of Medicine in the university’s School of Medicine, with joint appointments in the Bloomberg School’s Department of Epidemiology and Department of Health Policy and Management. He also is vice dean for clinical investigation in the School of Medicine. In that position, created in 2001, he is responsible for oversight of research that involves human volunteers. He has undertaken a widely praised restructuring of the school’s policies and procedures governing human subjects research.

“Mike Klag is a rare individual,” said Edward D. Miller, CEO of Johns Hopkins Medicine and dean of the School of Medicine. “I have been privileged as dean to have available to me his talents, his dedication, his insights, his integrity and his intellect. I have counted on Mike for wisdom and straightforward advice, always delivered with deft good humor. His selection as dean is a great step for the Bloomberg School and the university, and I am so pleased that I will continue to work with him in this new capacity.”

Klag is a 1974 graduate of Juniata College and earned his medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1978 and his MPH from Johns Hopkins in 1987. That same year he joined the university’s faculty as instructor of medicine and director of the clinical track of the preventive medicine residency program at the School of Hygiene and Public Health.

He was a founding member and interim director of the university’s Welch Center for Prevention, Epidemiology and Clinical Research; director of the Division of General Internal Medicine in the School of Medicine; and, in 2000-2001, interim physician-in-chief of The Johns Hopkins Hospital and interim director of the Department of Medicine in the School of Medicine. He has published more than 120 peer-reviewed articles and is a fellow of the American College of Physicians. In 1998, he was editor-in-chief of The Johns Hopkins Family Health Book.

Klag was one of the first epidemiologists to start to unravel the risk factors in, prevalence of and effective intervention strategies for kidney disease. He also has focused on the role of ethnicity in disease, searching, for instance, for explanations of the different risks among different groups for developing high blood pressure. Since 1988, Klag has directed the Precursors Study, a project begun in 1946 that tracks the health of Johns Hopkins School of Medicine alumni over many years to uncover risk factors and diagnostic markers for various diseases.

Klag said it was while he was a young internist and commissioned officer in the Public Health Service in Syracuse, N.Y., in the early 1980s that he first became acutely aware of the power of public health’s focus on preventing disease in entire populations, not just treating those who are already ill.

"I was in full time practice in an underserved community when I recognized the incredible importance of prevention,” Klag said. “I was seeing three or four generations of the same family. Younger generations had risk factors and maladaptive behaviors while their grandparents had cardiac disease. I realized it was a failure of prevention 20 or 30 years earlier that was leading to that disease."

When he arrived at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in 1984 to do research as a fellow, he said, his mentors told him it was critical that he cross Wolfe Street to study at the School of Hygiene and Public Health, to learn the art and science of designing population studies and testing intervention strategies. 

"When I came to Hopkins, I spent my first month at Public Health,” he said. “On the second or third day, I was sitting at faculty/student lunch with Abe Lilienfeld, George Comstock, Moyses Szklo and Leon Gordis, very senior leaders in epidemiology, discussing a study that had just been published. I knew right away that I had made the right decision. I said to myself, 'This is where I belong.' I've always had that sense of being at home on both sides of Wolfe Street.

"Since then," Klag said, "I have felt comfortable moving from thinking about clinical issues at the bedside to population based studies and interventions." He said he hopes to bring this spirit of collaboration and integration of clinical medicine and public health to his new position.

The Bloomberg School enrolls more than 1,800 students from 71 nations in master’s and doctoral programs in disciplines as diverse as environmental health, population and family health, biostatistics, molecular microbiology and immunology and international health. The school wins nearly a quarter of all federal research funding awarded to the 32 U.S. schools of public health.

Under Sommer, the school has grown significantly in numbers of students and faculty, in research funding and in philanthropic support. In 2004, it completed a 12-year, $130 million expansion and renovation of its facilities.

Public Affairs media contacts for the Johns Hopkins University: Dennis O'Shea at 443-287-9960 or dro@jhu.edu