Lainie Rutkow

Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Initiatives

Lainie Rutkow became the university’s inaugural vice provost for interdisciplinary initiatives in February 2022. She established the office of interdisciplinary initiatives (OII) within the office of the provost to develop and implement initiatives that span disciplines, promote innovative collaborations, and build partnerships within and outside of the university. Through OII, Dr. Rutkow and her team work closely with university leaders, the schools and divisions, the academic and cultural centers, and other key stakeholders to develop initiatives, programs, and policies that facilitate interdisciplinarity and the translation and dissemination of knowledge and discoveries.

As vice provost for interdisciplinary initiatives, Dr. Rutkow oversees a broad portfolio that includes the development and implementation of a collaborative, university-wide national engagement strategy to enhance the activities, visibility, and impact of Johns Hopkins faculty, staff, and students in Washington, DC and beyond; leadership of the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center, an award-winning global resource that features Covid-19 data and expert guidance; and the promotion of a wide range of efforts that span disciplines and domains with shared goals of discovery, knowledge translation and dissemination, and engagement and impact. She chairs a quarterly convening of leaders of extra-divisional and inter-divisional initiatives from throughout the university.

Dr. Rutkow previously served as senior advisor to the president of Johns Hopkins University.

She is a professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Bloomberg School of Public Health, with joint appointments in the Bloomberg School’s Department of Health, Behavior and Society and the School of Medicine’s Department of Emergency Medicine. For over 20 years, Dr. Rutkow has worked at the intersection of public policy, law, and health, and has acted as a bridge between academia and the public sector. She is particularly interested in sub-national natural experiments involving public health laws, and has led seminal evaluations of legal efforts to promote emergency preparedness, address opioid use disorders, and mitigate childhood obesity. Dr. Rutkow has authored over 125 peer-reviewed publications on these and related topics.

Earlier in her career, she was a visiting scholar with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Public Health Law Program and a fellow with the U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Government Reform.

Dr. Rutkow earned her bachelor’s degree in comparative literature and history of science and medicine from Yale University. She holds a J.D. from New York University School of Law, and an MPH and PhD in health policy and management from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She is a member of the bar in New York.