A Lifetime of Service to Public Health

James Curran led US efforts in HIV/AIDS prevention for 15 years at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) before joining Rollins School of Public health as its dean in 1995. Last year, Curran announced his retirement.

He will be succeeded by M. Daniele Fallin, an internationally regarded researcher and educator, who comes to Emory from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and was named the new James W. Curran Dean of Public Health at Rollins. 

“Jim Curran’s extraordinary vision and leadership helped establish the Rollins School of Public Health as a world leader in public health education and research,” says Jonathan Lewin, CEO of Emory Healthcare. “It’s humbling to reflect on the extraordinary impact of Jim’s leadership and his groundbreaking and lifesaving decades of work.”

In 1981, Curran accepted a leadership role on a CDC task force charged with determining what was behind the first cases of what is now known as AIDS. Reflecting on that time, Curran says, “The most important thing we did was come out with prevention recommendations before the cause was found. If you read those recommendations today, they sound pretty good.”

Emory’s School of Public Health was just five years old when Curran was tapped to lead it. 

Under his strategic leadership, Rollins has grown steadily over the past two decades, with six academic departments and an executive MPH program for working professionals among its academic programs. As of 2020, Rollins employs more than 200 full-time faculty as well as 250 adjunct faculty from the CDC, CARE, the Task Force for Global Health, the Carter Center, and state and local health departments. The school is home to more than 22 interdisciplinary centers and 10 dual degree programs that bridge students to related fields such as business, medicine, nursing, law, and theology. 

James Curran joined the Rollins School of Public Health as dean and professor of epidemiology in 1995 following his 25-year career of leadership at the CDC.

Annually, Rollins enrolls cohorts of approximately 600 public health master’s students from all 50 states and more than 40 countries, with nearly 20 percent originating from outside the US. With Laney Graduate School, Rollins offers seven PhD programs. Today, more than 10,000 Rollins alumni are contributing to public health in 104 countries. 

Rollins is ranked No. 4 among accredited schools and programs of public health by US News & World Report and has a reputation for being a collaborative work and learning environment. Curran can be credited for fostering a strong sense of community among faculty, staff, and students through his personal approach as dean.

At the time he announced his retirement, Curran was the longest-serving dean at Emory and among schools of public health in the United States. “We have much to be proud of at Rollins and should be very confident about the future,”
he says.