On June 13, 1916, Johns Hopkins University receives $267,000 from the Rockefeller Foundation and founds the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health (JHSPH), with William Henry Welch as its first director. It is the world’s first independent degree-granting school of public health for research, education, and practice. [1]
- 1917 – William Henry Howell is appointed the first faculty member and becomes founding chair of the Department of Physiological Hygiene.
- 1917 – JHSPH establisth the first academic departments in the world for immunology, epidemiology and public health administration. Also the first school of public health to establish departments of statistics, bacteriology, chemical hygiene (biochemistry) and sanitary engineering.
- The first classes are held on October 1, 1918, in a physics lab on West Monument Street. Six of 16 students are female. Three are foreign citizens (from Brazil and Trinidad). Among 32 faculty, 9 are female.
- 1919 JHSPH awards three DrPH degrees to the School’s first graduating class. The first graduate is Nathan Berman.
- 1921 William Henry Welch founds the first public health research journal called Johns Hopkins American Journal of Hygiene today known as the American Journal of Epidemiology
- The first jounals gave attention to hookworm, [2] the very disease that the Rockefeller Foundation‘s International Health Commision [3, 4] focused its initial attention on.