Kelly Gebo discovered her passion for public health by building from one-on-one patient care to understanding the importance of community and system support. As an undergraduate, she was at first interested in pre-med and biology. But her course of study inevitably brought to her attention broad, systemic issues in the field of medicine, awakening the first glimmers of interest in a path that would eventually lead her to the helm of the George Washington University’s (GW) Milken Institute School of Public Health (Milken Institute SPH). Gebo began her tenure as dean on Oct. 1, and will be installed as the Michael and Lori Milken Dean of Public Health on Nov. 4.
“What I really was interested in was healthcare disparities, looking at how healthcare systems worked with the government and how we could best provide healthcare to a variety of populations,” Gebo told David Goldstein, president of the Milken Institute SPH’s Public Health Student Association (PHSA), in a video interview this month. “It wasn't until much later in my undergraduate career that I learned what public health was, and that’s when I began to pursue a career focusing on how to get to that type of research and funding.”
In the years since, that career has spanned an impressive range of fields. Prior to her arrival at GW, Gebo held a variety of roles during a two-decade career at the Johns Hopkins University. A professor of medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine with a joint appointment at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in epidemiology, she also was deputy director of the Johns Hopkins University Institute for Clinical and Translational Research, which bridges communication of clinical discoveries between the community and researchers.
She served as director of the Johns Hopkins KL-2 Clinical Research Scholars Program, mentoring early-career investigators for independently funded careers in clinical and translational research. Until 2016, she served as director of the public health undergraduate studies program, growing the program from a small interdisciplinary major into the largest on campus. And from 2014 to 2017, Gebo also served as the school’s vice provost for education, responsible for the undergraduate and graduate programs across all nine divisions of the university.
Beyond Johns Hopkins, Gebo served as the inaugural chief medical and scientific officer for the All of Us research program at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) from 2018 to 2020. As leader of this national initiative advancing precision medicine through large-scale data collection and patient engagement, she worked with senior NIH leadership and across federal health agencies, coordinating with local, national and global leaders and patient groups to recruit research participants from groups traditionally underrepresented in biomedical research.
As an aspiring or practicing medical provider, Gebo said, it’s important to provide care for the patient in front of you. But it’s also crucial to see how that patient’s individual experience might give insight into patient populations of which they are part. “That's what I really want to do, is to help impact policy—not just for the person sitting in front of me, but the population at large,” she said.
By introducing herself to the GW community through a conversation with Goldstein, a DrPH student and practicing occupational therapist, she underscored one of her top priorities as dean: engaging with students, faculty and staff to understand their goals and incorporate their perspectives as the school approaches its fourth decade.
“I'm most excited about getting out and meeting the faculty, the students, the staff, learning about what they're interested in, what research they're doing, what projects they're engaged in,” Gebo said. “I'm really excited to learn more about what their passions are and how we can facilitate moving that forward in the coming years.”
Students in particular often have their fingers on the pulse of public health as the field evolves, Gebo said, giving insight into key questions and new paths forward. One of the highlights of her first weeks at GW, she said, was a campus tour that laid out how student input shaped the campus’s green spaces and sustainable architecture.
“I think it's a great example of how our students have been able to identify issues of sustainability and really be able to have an impact…and then we've actually responded [by] building this beautiful space,” Gebo said in her exchange with Goldstein. “I look forward to working with students like you and others at the school for similar types of ideas [about] how we can do better today and in the future.”
Having an open dialogue and many perspectives to draw on is particularly important right now, Gebo said, as the United States and the world evaluate various approaches to public health in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Public health has changed a lot in the past decade,” she said. In some ways, the pandemic “helped us think about public health in different ways—social determinants of health, economic impact, educational opportunities for our children.” It’s also a time of uncertainty in a variety of arenas—preparation for a potential future pandemic, the public health impact of climate change, the effect of AI on research and patient care and many others. Since public health is never completely predictable, flexibility may be as important a skill for GW to impart as the mastery of cutting-edge technology and research techniques.
“Preparing our students with basic skills in the current environment and then preparing them to be continuous learners, I think, is going to be important,” Gebo said. “I'm hoping that we can prepare students to be ready for the next whatever challenge public health brings us.”
Outside of work, Gebo loves spending time with family and friends, she said, often going to the farmers market and picking up local foods with which to try new recipes together as well as prioritizing exercise. Her children, too, are athletes: Her daughter Elizabeth was a collegiate rower, and her son, Nicholas, a 2023 alum of the Milken Institute SPH, played water polo at GW—“so I spent a lot of time poolside at the Smith Center.”
The family is full of fans of Baltimore sports teams like the Ravens and Orioles, Gebo said, but she concedes laughingly that her family is now becoming interested in D.C. teams. “One of the things we enjoy is an Orioles-Nationals game, so I look forward to future opportunities to participate in the Battle of the Beltway [next season].”
Being based in D.C. is, of course, about more than sports, Gebo said. She looks forward to leveraging the Milken Institute SPH’s status as the only dedicated school of health in the nation’s capital, a city from which local, national and global impact are all possible—whether through one-on-one interactions, the population-wide implications of a research project or the nation- and worldwide repercussions of American healthcare policy.
“I look forward to working with both [students] and faculty on opportunities we can use to leverage our location to build future programs,” Gebo said as she closed out her conversation with Goldstein.
