“I owe a lot to the School of Public Health,” John A. Quelch, DBA ’77, SM ‘78 says. “And that is why my wife and I decided to create a named professorship during the Campaign.”

Quelch and his wife, Joyce, created this generous gift through a Harvard Donor Advised Fund.  The donor creates the advised fund through Harvard and then directs the distribution of the funds.  This fund will be directed to Harvard Chan School for the Huntley Family Professorship of Healthcare Management.

Professor John A. Quelch bridges the gap between big business and public health with a course that teaches graduate students in both Business School and the Public Health school.  He arrived at this nexus through a career teaching and writing case studies.

While working on his DBA at Harvard in the ‘70’s, his thesis work on the nutritional attributes of ready-to-eat-breakfast-cereal industry brought him to appreciate Dr. James Austin, an associate professor with the School of Public Health and a member of his thesis committee.  He suggested certain courses for Quelch, one of which he taught, Nutrition Policy Planning, and another by Mark Hegsted called Nutrition and Epidemiology. Taking Dr. Hegsted’s course made Quelch a convert, and directed him to get his SM in Public Health. 

“There were important pioneers in health education, Austin and Hegsted included, but I think Marjorie Young was the most important.  I was dealing with consumer purchase behavior, and she worked on nutrition information and labeling. Her portrait hangs in the School’s building.”  However, it was Mark Hegsted who mentored Quelch to submit his articles to Nutrition Reviews and the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. Quelch took best practices from the commercial sector and applied those insights to nutrition information education and marketing.

Quelch has had a distinguished career—becoming an assistant professor at Western Ontario Business School, testifying before the US Congress at age 27, teaching at HBS for 30 years, and then becoming the dean of CEIBS, China’s leading business school, in Shanghai.  After attending an HSPH research colloquium at Harvard’s Shanghai research center, he and Barry Bloom discussed Quelch’s interest in working both with the Chan School and HBS.  “Barry I guess then talked with [Dean] Julio [Frenk] because when I served on the Trilateral Commission Julio was well aware of my desire, and we were able to put together this first joint appointment between the two schools when I returned from China…and from the very beginning I’ve enjoyed it so much because people have been very welcoming.”

In addition to teaching and writing, Professor Quelch designed a collaborative conference entitled “Building a Culture of Health: A New Imperative for Business,” which was led by Prof. Howard Koh and brought HCSPH, HBS and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation together with 300 people in a setting of panel discussions, each co-led by an HBS and an HCSPH faculty member.

Quelch feels being at Harvard Chan was like walking into a School of Who’s Who. “It’s just humbling to be around experts like David Hemenway [gun violence] and Dyann Wirth [malaria].  Their research is transferrable, and I feel that so many of the public health problems are quite intractable and require the convergent efforts of the public sector, private sector, and civil society to really be able to solve them.  So that is another reason for wanting to create a professorship of healthcare management.  Hopefully, that person will be able to bridge the two schools and bring the best of what is here to the students and faculty of HBS.”

Professor Quelch was appointed in 2017 as Vice Provost for Executive Education and Dean of the School of Business Administration at the University of Miami.