Boston researcher to be founding dean of UT School of Public Health San Antonio
SAN ANTONIO, Texas - A Boston University public health researcher has been named the founding dean of the new University of Texas School of Public Health San Antonio.
Vasan Ramachandran, MD, an internationally known and highly respected physician-scientist and clinical epidemiologist, will assume his position on September 1. UTSA says that Ramachandran’s research has focused on heart failure, blood pressure and cardiac remodeling.
The new UT School of Public Health is a strategic collaboration of the UT Health Science Center at San Antonio (UT Health San Antonio) and UTSA and is one of three schools of public health in the University of Texas System.
UTSA says that establishing the new School of Public Health and recruiting Ramachandran as dean "introduces a new era for UTSA’s and UT Health San Antonio’s shared mission to serve the public good".
Vasan Ramachandran, MD (The University of Texas at San Antonio)
"We seek to improve public health in close partnership with the city of San Antonio, Bexar County, our research and development partners, and the health care community," Taylor Eighmy, PhD, president of UTSA, said in a release. "This new school allows us to meet critical public health workforce needs and is a major boost to both institutions’ positive momentum and commitment to being a center of excellence in public health education, service and research."
Ramachandran has served on the faculty of the Boston University School of Medicine and School of Public Health for more than 25 years and as principal investigator of the Framingham Heart Study since 2014, says UTSA.
Ramachandran also has served since 2019 as one of the principal investigators for the Risk Underlying Rural Areas Longitudinal Study (RURAL) aimed at addressing critical gaps in the knowledge of heart and lung disorders in rural counties in the southeastern U.S., according to UTSA.
He has more than 1,060 publications to his name, including many in prominent journals such as The New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, the Journal of the American Medical Association and Circulation, says UTSA.