Allan Rosenfield and Josh Ruxin

Dr. Allan Rosenfield, dean and DeLamar Professor, Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University, has dedicated his career to fighting for the health and wellbeing of the world’s most vulnerable populations, with an unwavering commitment to sexual and reproductive health. Dr. Rosenfield is internationally recognized for his innovative public health work, including strategies to address maternal mortality and the HIV/AIDS pandemic. He led the movement to focus on the pregnant woman in her own right, rather than as a means for ensuring child health; and he was among the first to call for methods of decreasing mother-to-child transmission of HIV that would also provide ongoing treatment for the mothers.

Following training in obstetrics and gynecology at Harvard’s Boston Lying-In Hospital (now the Brigham and Women’s Hospital), Dr. Rosenfield worked in Nigeria as an obstetrician and, later, as Population Council Representative in Thailand, where he helped revolutionize the delivery of family planning services. He joined Columbia University in 1975 as the founding director of the Center for

Population and Family Health and director of ambulatory care for the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology.

Dr. Rosenfield became dean of the Mailman School of Public Health in 1986, and has positioned the School as a major force in New York City’s public health arena and extended its reach around the globe. He has received numerous honors, including awards from the Government of Thailand, the International Federation of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, APHA’s Martha May Elliot and Carl Schultz Awards, the New York Academy of Medicine Stephen Smith Award, Planned Parenthood Federation of America Margaret Sanger Award, Doctors of the World Health and Human Rights Leadership Award, American Legacy Foundation Leadership Award for Extraordinary Leadership in Public Health, the International Women’s Health Coalition, and the United Nations Population Award. He is a member of the Institute of Medicine, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

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Josh Ruxin is Assistant Clinical Professor of Public Health at the Mailman School of Public Health and Director of the Access Project for the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria at the Center for Global Health and Economic Development at Columbia University. Ruxin is also Country Director for the Millennium Village Project in Kigali, Rwanda, where he currently lives. He focuses on comprehensive approaches to fighting poverty with emphasis on scaling up national health programs.

The Millennium Village project is demonstrating that substantive and rapid investments in human development can help the poor achieve all the Millennium Development Goals in less than five years. The project aims to break the vicious cycle of poverty by addressing community needs – in education, health, agriculture, transport, energy and water.

In 2002, Ruxin founded the Access Project, which provides technical expertise to several countries, including Kenya, Ethiopia, Rwanda, and Nigeria. Since its formation the project has assembled grant requests that have yielded over $1 billion in funding. In Rwanda the project delivers private sector management skills to district-level health systems and is helping to address the needs of over 1.8 million Rwandans this year. Previously, Ruxin was co-founder and Vice President of ontheFRONTIER, a strategy consulting firm providing advisory services to businesses in developing countries. He also served as co-chair of the United Nations Millennium Project Task Force on HIV/AIDS.

Ruxin received a B.A. in the History of Science and Medicine from Yale University, where he was a Truman Scholar. He was a Fulbright Scholar in Bolivia, holds a Master of Public Health degree from Columbia University, and a PhD in History from the University of London, where he was a Marshall Scholar. He serves on the Board of FilmAid International and Orphans of Rwanda, Inc., and is a member of the Global HIV Prevention Working Group. He is also on the faculty of the Clergy Leadership Project.