Harvard public health school faces severe financial crisis

Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health is bracing for the possibility of losing as much as half of its federal research funding in the coming years, some $100 million annually, prompting the school to take extraordinary measures, such as asking corporations to underwrite the tuition of PhD candidates.

The school has already laid off an undisclosed number of staffers, reduced its class of Ph.D. students by nearly half, and shelved research projects because of a harsh new reality: the government is shifting away from funding public health.

“We are cutting spending across the school and focusing our resources on our highest priority research,” Andrea Baccarelli, the Chan School’s dean of faculty and a renowned environmental health researcher, said in a statement. “That has been a painful process, as we have had to lay off highly valued colleagues and shut down important science, but it is the responsible thing to do.”