Lainie Rutkow became the university’s executive vice provost in January 2024. She is a professor of health policy and management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. As executive vice provost, Dr. Rutkow oversees a broad portfolio that includes faculty affairs, student affairs, admissions and financial aid, diversity and inclusion, and institutional equity. She is integrally involved in the creation of the Johns Hopkins School of Government and Policy, the university’s first new academic division since 2007.
From 2022 to 2023, Dr. Rutkow served as vice provost for interdisciplinary initiatives, with a charge to develop and implement initiatives that span disciplines, promote innovative collaborations, and build partnerships within and outside of the university. She led the strategic and academic planning for all aspects of the university’s expansion in Washington, DC, including formation of the operational, financial, and organizational models associated with the $650M development of the Hopkins Bloomberg Center. The following initiatives were launched under her leadership: Nexus Awards, a $15 million program to support faculty-led research, convening, and teaching at the Hopkins Bloomberg Center; Hopkins Semester in DC, an immersive, semester-long program in which undergraduates live, study, and work in Washington, DC; Congressional Briefing Series, in conjunction with the university’s federal strategy team, to give policymakers and others up-to-the-minute analysis from JHU experts; Irene and Richard Frary Library, the newest and only DC-based branch of the university’s Sheridan Libraries network; Health Policy Forum, a quarterly series featuring conversations with leaders addressing today’s most pressing health policy challenges; and The Johns Hopkins Briefing, a rapid response public-facing series featuring faculty analysis about topics of national and global importance, with real-time Q&A.
From 2019 to 2021, Dr. Rutkow served as senior advisor to the President of Johns Hopkins University.
An expert in the translation and dissemination of research for policymakers and other audiences, Dr. Rutkow developed and led the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center, an interdisciplinary global resource that featured Covid-19 data and expert guidance and was viewed over 2.5 billion times. TIME recognized the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center as the “go-to data source” for COVID-19 and named it one of the Top 100 Inventions of 2020. In addition, the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center received accolades from Research!America, Fast Company, Geospatial World Forum, Regional Studies Association, and World Federation of Public Health Associations. Dr. Rutkow routinely participated in public and media briefings during the Covid pandemic – including the Johns Hopkins 30-Minute COVID-19 Briefing – viewed hundreds of thousands of times.
Dr. Rutkow is a nationally and internationally recognized public health law scholar. Her research – grounded in her interdisciplinary training in law, policy, public health, and empirical research methodology – concerns the use of law and policy as tools to protect and promote population-level health. She is especially interested in the evaluation of sub-national natural policy experiments intended to address public health challenges. Dr. Rutkow has led seminal evaluations of governments’ efforts to advance emergency preparedness and response, address opioid use disorders, and mitigate childhood obesity through law and policy. She has authored over 125 peer-reviewed publications on these and related topics in law, policy, and biomedical journals. Dr. Rutkow’s work has been supported by the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and American Heart Association.
A bridge-builder between academia and government, Dr. Rutkow routinely consults with governments at all levels about innovative approaches to promote the public’s health. From 2016 to 2019, she was the inaugural visiting scholar with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Public Health Law Program, the only U.S. government unit with an explicit focus on public health law. Earlier in her career, she completed a fellowship with the U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Government Reform.
Dr. Rutkow received a PhD and MPH, in health policy, from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health; holds a JD from New York University School of Law; and earned a BA in comparative literature and history of science and medicine from Yale University. She is a member of the bar in New York.
