On Wednesday, Sept. 18, Tulane President Mike Fitts announced the renaming of the School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine after alumna Celia Scott Weatherhead during a public address at the school’s Downtown campus. Weatherhead’s most recent donation is the single largest in university history, putting her total lifetime giving at over $160 million.  

“I can’t overstate how important this is for Tulane and our future,” Fitts said in an interview with The Hullabaloo. “We’ve truly become a research juggernaut, and our campus is being transformed, and what this does is accelerate that momentum.”  

The Celia Scott Weatherhead School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, as it will henceforth be known, intends to be one of the nation’s premier institutions on issues of infectious disease epidemiology, cancer control, population health, public health policy and more, and within the top few institutions of its kind globally. The school plans to direct the funds primarily towards students in the form of scholarships but also may use the money to grow its faculty and physical infrastructure Downtown.  

Fitts emphasized the importance of the school’s location in the South and its potential impact on the region as a resource for public health professionals: “You look at this city, this region and the South more generally, and there are all sorts of challenges in terms of health outcomes,” he said. “The focus here is using the [School of Public Health] in analyzing the reasons for that and making a difference in that. And that also means… educating the professionals who will go out and make a difference.”  

Tulane was founded in 1834 with the mission of addressing the cholera, yellow fever and smallpox epidemics of the day. Thomas LaVeist, dean of the Celia Scott Weatherhead School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, expounded on the various contemporary issues that the school seeks to address:

“We’re a city below sea level, surrounded by water, one of the most fragile locations on the planet as it relates to climate change. We have one of the highest cancer burdens of any community in this country. We have one of the highest rates of cardiovascular disease, heart disease of any state in this country. Maternal mortality rate is the highest of any state in the country. HIV rate is the highest in the country. So we have no choice except to take on all of the health challenges that affect this community.” 

Weatherhead’s gift could provide the seed funding for initiatives the school has been wanting to develop, such as a cancer prevention research center, a climate change and health center, a health equity institute and a health policy institute, according to LaVeist.   

The Celia Scott Weatherhead School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine will be the second named entity among Tulane’s 10 schools, joining the A.B. Freeman School of Business. “This naming gift now places the Tulane School of Public Health in its proper place as one of the historic, foundational schools of public health,” LaVeist said. “It’s one of the schools that established the field of public health, and it positions us in our proper location among our true peer institutions like Harvard, Johns Hopkins and Columbia.” 

The unveiling ceremony took place at the School of Public Health’s Downtown location on Wednesday afternoon.