Julio Frenk, a public health expert and president of the University of Miami, has been appointed the next chancellor of UCLA, the University of California Board of Regents announced Wednesday.
Frenk will be the first Latino to lead the university, where 21% of undergraduates and 13% of graduate students are Hispanic.
“I consider myself a boundary spanner and a bridge builder,” Frenk said in a news release announcing his appointment. “And I know that the strength of institutions of higher learning — socially, academically and intellectually — comes from their diversity and from a willingness to cross boundaries.”
Frenk was born and raised in Mexico and received his medical degree from the National Autonomous University of Mexico. He served as Mexico’s secretary of health under President Vicente Fox and helped reform the public health care system with universal health care and expanded access to contraception and family planning.
He has also held leadership roles at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Health Organization and Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He assumed the presidency at the University of Miami in 2015, where he was also the first Latino to hold that role.
In an interview after his University of Miami appointment, Frenk told NBC News that he was “very committed to diversity and inclusion.” He stressed the role inclusion has played in his own life as the son of a Jewish father whose family escaped persecution in Nazi Germany.
“In spite of incredible adversity, my family found a welcoming place in Mexico, in a country that was poorer [economically] than Germany … but much richer in terms of tolerance and acceptance,” he said in 2016.
Frenk has taken a sabbatical from the University of Miami as he prepares for his new role, the University of Miami said Wednesday. The university appointed chief executive officer Joe Echevarria, who is also Hispanic, as acting president.
Frenk will take office at UCLA in January, replacing current chancellor Gene Block. Darnell Hunt, executive vice chancellor and provost of UCLA, will serve as interim chancellor after Block steps down in July.
“[Frenk] is widely respected across academia and well known as an exceptional thinker, an administrator of considerable ability and a brilliant academic,” Block said in the news release.
UCLA made national headlines in May after protests over the Israel-Hamas war turned violent and led to hundreds of arrests. This week, 25 more people were arrested after police were called to disband another encampment on campus.
For more from NBC Latino, sign up for our weekly newsletter.
