Linda P. Fried, MD, MPH

Linda P. Fried, MD, MPH, is Director, the Robert N. Butler Columbia Aging Center, a university wide center, the Robert N. Butler Professor of Healthy Aging and Dean Emerita of Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health (she served as Dean from 2008 to 2025).

As Director of the Butler Columbia Aging Center, Dr. Fried leads a university-wide center mandated to be located in the School of Public Health. The goals of the Center extend from cells to society and back, with a mission of defining the opportunities to create healthy longevity for individuals and societies. The Center envisions that investing in the opportunities of longevity, as well as using the evidence as to how best to meet the needs of aging, can create a Third Demographic Dividend in which all ages thrive because of longevity.

Dr. Fried is a physician expert in geriatric medicine and gerontology and an internationally renowned population scientist. She has dedicated her career to the science of healthy longevity, including defining frailty as a clinical syndrome and illuminating its causes, and defining the causes, consequences and prevention of frailty, disability, loneliness and chronic diseases with aging. Her work has contributed to knowledge as to the bases for a world where greater longevity benefits people of all ages. To that end, she is the co-designer and co-founder of Experience Corps. This evidence-based and community-based senior volunteer program was the first program created to demonstrate the value of new social organizations that enable the unprecedented social capital of older adults to make a difference in their communities improving the academic success of children in public elementary schools, at scale, while simultaneously designed to improve the health and wellbeing of the volunteers as an evidence-based public health program. Dr. Fried continues to conduct scholarly work to define the social capital and social infrastructure needs of an aging society and public health needs to create healthy longevity for all. Dr. Fried has proposed that investing in these and other opportunities of longevity can result in creating a Third Demographic Dividend that enables society and individuals of all ages to flourish because of our now-longer lives. This will require a life-course approach to prevention of ill health so as to extend health span, and transforming society's social infrastructure to enable meaningful and significant roles for older adults. Dr. Fried has served as a member of the global think tank, the 'Aging Society Network', since 2006. With the goal of creating and distilling the science base for successful societies of longer lives, she co-chaired the 2022 National Academy of Medicine report, “Global Roadmap for Health Longevity”. She chaired the 2025 Initiative “Healthy Longevity: Public Health’s Next Frontier. A framework for research, education, practice and policy” of the Association of Schools and Programs of Public Health, offering a call to action for academic public health to lead a societal transformation towards healthy longevity, and stating that public health has to lead to create longer health spans for all, with long, engaged lives with intact health and function.

As Dean of the Mailman School from 2008 to 2025, Dr. Fried led one of the three original schools of public health in the U.S., which marked its Centennial in 2022. Under her leadership as Dean, Columbia Public Health became recognized as the leading innovator in public health education and led the investment in next-century programs and leadership on the key challenges of the 21st century. Among the many ground-breaking initiatives that she led in creating are the interdisciplinary Center on Climate Change and Health, the Butler Columbia Aging Center, the Lerner Center for Public Health Promotion, the TRAIL AI laboratory, centers on child health and wellbeing, the injury center that is developing knowledge needed for preventing gun violence, and the Brody Center for Population Mental Health, and a groundbreaking program to develop the science of what health is. The School's innovative programs address global mental health, define public health systems for the future, and create next-generation approaches to pandemic prevention, health in the context of forced migration, sexual and reproductive health, preventing maternal mortality, and data science for health are among the School's many ground-breaking programs.

Prior to becoming Dean at Columbia in 2008, Dr. Fried was the Mason F. Lord Professor of Geriatric Medicine at the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, where she was the founding Director of the Center on Aging and Health, the center of excellence for aging research, and Director of the Division of Geriatric Medicine and Gerontology. She was the principal investigator of major longitudinal cohort studies, including the NIH-funded Cardiovascular Health Study and the Women's Health and Aging Studies I and II, of the National Institute on Aging’s Older Americans' Independence Center, and of randomized controlled trials, including the Experience Corps Trial and the GEM trial of Gingko Biloba for prevention of cognitive decline. She was the founding Chair of the Johns Hopkins Department of Medicine Task Force on the Academic Careers of Women in Medicine (1989-95) and chaired the University President's Task Force on the Status of Women in Academic Careers (1998-2003).
Dr. Fried is the author of over 500 peer-reviewed articles. She is an elected member of the U.S. National Academy of Medicine since 2000, and was elected and then re-elected to its Executive Council from 2017 to 2023. Elected to the Association of American Physicians in 2003, she served as its President from 2016-17. She served on the Council of the National Institute on Aging, and as a member of the World Economic Forum's Global Agenda Council on Aging (2006-18) and its Council on Longevity, and co-chaired its Council on Human Enhancement. Dean Fried is an elected member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She was named among the top 1 percent "most influential scientific minds of the past decade" by Thomson-Reuters in 2014, and by The New York Times as "one of 15 world leaders in science" in 2012. She is the recipient of numerous honors and awards, including, most recently, the 2024 Stephen Smith Medal of the New York Academy of Medicine; the 2023 David Rall Medal of the National Academy of Medicine; the 2022 George M. Kober Medal of the Association of American Physicians; Nicholas Murray Butler Medal, Columbia University; and Crain's New York Health Care Notable; Politics New York Power Players in Health Care, In 2023 she was named a Chevalier de La Legion d’Honneur (Knight of the Legion of Honor) by the Government of France.