Julio Frenk, president of University of Miami, named UCLA’s first Latino chancellor
Julio Frenk, a public health expert and current president of the University of Miami, has been appointed the next chancellor of UCLA.
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.
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