A Night to Remember

The stars came out September 19 in Manhattan as nearly 400 public health luminaries and friends attended the Bloomberg Hopkins 100 Awards event to celebrate 100 years of lifesaving public health. A fitting celebration of the Bloomberg School’s Centennial, three-term New York City mayor and philanthropist Michael R. Bloomberg honored public health leaders from around the world. Bloomberg and event co-hosts Johns Hopkins University President Ronald J. Daniels, LLM, JD, and Bloomberg School Dean Michael J. Klag, MD, MPH ’87, honored visionaries including:

• Bono, lead singer of U2 and Co-founder of ONE and (RED)
   
• Margaret Chan, WHO director-general
   
• Peter Piot, director of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine
   
• Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, president of Liberia
   
• Tabaré Vázquez, president of Uruguay

News anchor Katie Couric emceed the evening, which also featured Vice President Joe Biden and CDC director Thomas R. Frieden. The event included the presentation of the $100,000 Bloomberg Hopkins Emerging Leader Award to Tolbert Nyenswah, Liberia’s deputy health minister and a 2012 MPH graduate who led his country’s remarkable turnaround of the Ebola outbreak. The $100,000 award recognized a student or alumnus who has demonstrated exceptional contributions to public health and leadership potential. The event followed the September 15th announcement of a $300 million gift by Michael R. Bloomberg to create the Bloomberg American Health Initiative at the Bloomberg School. “For 100 years, the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health has been the single most influential and important school of public health in the world,” said Bloomberg. “Its past and present graduates, faculty, and administrators perform difficult and often thankless work, not for money or fame, but to live up to the School’s motto: saving lives—millions at a time. My involvement with Hopkins and its school of public health has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my life.”