Description:

Brian L. Strom, M.D., M.P.H., is the Inaugural Chancellor of Rutgers Biomedical and Health Sciences (RBHS) and the Executive Vice President for Health Affairs at Rutgers University. Born in 1949, he grew up in Queens and attended public schools. He earned a B.S. at Yale University in 1971, M.D. at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in 1975, and M.P.H. in Epidemiology at the University of California, Berkeley. From 1975 to 1978, he was an intern and resident in Internal Medicine and from 1978 to 1980 he was an NIH fellow in Clinical Pharmacology at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). In 1980, he joined the faculty at the Perelman School of Medicine of the University of Pennsylvania, where he went on to serve as the Executive Vice Dean of Institutional Affairs, Founding Chair of the Department of Biostatistics and Epidemiology, Founding Director of the Center for Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics, and Founding Director of the Graduate Program in Epidemiology and Biostatistics. Part one of the oral history delves into Rutgers University's response to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and then traces the evolution of the pandemic and Rutgers' decision making over the course of 2020-2021. At the end of part one, Dr. Strom relates his family's history and his own upbringing and education. In part two, he discusses his undergraduate years at Yale during the late 1960s, experiences in medical school and as an intern and resident at UCSF, interests and research in clinical epidemiology and pharmacoepidemiology, career at Penn, transition to Rutgers, role as Inaugural Chancellor of RBHS after the merger with UMDNJ, and the current status and challenges facing RBHS.