Government of Mexico and education secretary
Reyes Tamez in
Los Pinos during the initialing ceremony of the
National Institute of Genomic Medicine in July 2004 's sixth president in January 2016 in October 2018 In 1984, Frenk was appointed director of the Centre of Public Health Research in the
Ministry of Health of Mexico, a role he held until 1987. Following that, he went on to serve as the founding director general of Mexico's
Instituto Nacional de Salud Publica from 1987 to 1992. From 1995 to 1998, he served as executive vice president of the Mexican Health Foundation, a private non-profit organization, and director of the organization's Centre for Health and the Economy. Frenk also has served in several academic roles, including as a senior researcher at the National Institute of Public Health and as adjunct professor of medicine and national researcher at the
National Autonomous University of Mexico in
Mexico City. In 1992–1993, he was visiting professor at the
Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies at
Harvard University's
Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. In 1993, he was an advisor on health reform for the government of
Colombia, working alongside health economist
Felicia Knaul. The two married in 1995, and settled in Mexico. In 1998, Frenk was appointed executive director of evidence and information for policy at the
World Health Organization (WHO) in
Geneva.
Minister of Health of Mexico Frenk served as the 17th
Secretary of Health of Mexico from December 2000 to November 2006. Following the election of
Vicente Fox in
Mexico's 2000 presidential election, Frenk was appointed minister of health of Mexico, a position he held until December 2006. In 2003, as Mexico's secretary of health, Frenk introduced a comprehensive national health insurance program called Seguro Popular, which expanded access to health care for tens of millions of previously uninsured Mexicans. In 2003, Frenk was among five final candidates for the position of director-general of the
World Health Organization (WHO) alongside
Lee Jong-wook,
Pascoal Mocumbi,
Peter Piot, and Ismail Sallam; Lee was eventually appointed the position. In 2004, Frenk was criticized by tobacco control advocates for his role in cutting an unusual deal with tobacco companies in which
Philip Morris and
British American Tobacco agreed to donate $400 million for health programs in Mexico over two and a half years but reserved the right to cancel the donation if cigarette taxes were raised. In September 2006, the Mexican government again nominated Frenk as a candidate for the leadership of the World Health Organization. The British medical journal
The Lancet published an editorial endorsing Frenk as the best candidate while
The Wall Street Journal reported that Frenk's controversial 2004 tobacco deal could hurt his chances for election. While at Harvard, he was also the T & G Angelopoulos Professor of Public Health and International Development, a joint appointment made with the
Harvard Kennedy School. In January 2013, Frenk spent a week in
China, seeking to strengthen ties between Harvard's School of Public Health and the
Chinese government and the nation's healthcare sector. Under Frenk's leadership, Harvard's School of Public Health received its largest ever gift of $350 million and was renamed
Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in 2014. In addition to his role as dean of Harvard School of Public Health, Frenk co-chaired, along with Lincoln Chen, the Commission on the Education of Health Professionals for the 21st Century, which published its final report in
The Lancet in 2010. The report recommended that governments place the same emphasis on fighting
cancer that they place on infectious diseases like
AIDS and
malaria. He served on the High-Level Task Force for the
International Conference on Population and Development, co-chaired by
Joaquim Chissano and
Tarja Halonen, from 2012 to 2014. In 2013, Frenk joined
Vicente Fox and others in campaigning for
marijuana legalization at a series of events in the United States and Mexico. In 2015, Frenk co-edited a collection of non-fiction essays on the subject of
global health, "
To Save Humanity," which included work from
Michelle Bachelet,
Larry Summers,
Elton John, Frenk, and others.
University of Miami Frenk served as the 6th president of the
University of Miami from August 2015 to June 2024. On April 13, 2015, the University of Miami announced the appointment of Frenk as the university's sixth president, succeeding
Donna Shalala. He was inaugurated on January 29, 2016. The University of Miami joined the
Association of American Universities during Frenk's tenure. On June 12, 2024, the
University of California, Los Angeles announced that Frenk would be joining the university as its
chancellor on January 1, 2025. The same day, the University of Miami announced that the university's chief executive officer, Joe Echevarria, had been appointed acting president of the University of Miami "effective immediately." Under Frenk's nine years of leadership of the University of Miami, the university slipped notably on the
U.S. News & World Report ranking of national universities, which ranked the university 48th in the nation upon his arrival in 2015 and 67th in the nation upon his departure in 2024.
University of California, Los Angeles On June 12, 2024, the
Regents of the University of California named Frenk as the 7th chancellor of the
University of California, Los Angeles, effective January 1, 2025, with an annual salary of US$978,904. According to the
Los Angeles Times, his salary at UCLA was "a significant reduction from" his base pay of US$1.68 million at the University of Miami at the time of his departure. ==Other activities==