The World Is Waiting: The Campaign for Harvard Medicine

Harvard Medical School has changed too, thanks in part to The World Is Waiting: The Campaign for Harvard Medicine. At its core, this ambitious fundraising initiative was about helping people live longer, healthier lives through investments in education, discovery, service, and leadership.

Surpassing its $750 million Campaign goal, HMS raised more than $789 million from July 1, 2011, through June 30, 2018.

Nearly 10,000 alumni, friends, volunteers, faculty, staff, corporations, and foundations made Campaign gifts and pledges

At the official launch event for the Campaign, then-HMS Dean Jeffrey S. Flier, MD, said, “Even at Harvard, in this pulsing ecosystem of energized people able to educate, innovate, and discover, we cannot fund everything we should—and must.”

Flier added that the success of this fundraising initiative, the most ambitious in HMS’s history, would be critical to the health of our children, grandchildren, and the whole human family around the globe.

“When we launched this Campaign, I said that if you’re looking to advance human medicine, investing in the best means investing in Harvard Medicine,” says Campaign Chair Joshua Boger, AM ’75, PhD ’79, founder and former CEO of Vertex Pharmaceuticals, a member of the HMS Board of Fellows, and co-chair of the HMS Discovery Council. “I am thrilled to see that so many people chose to join us and heed the call.”

These collective gifts have enabled significant progress. In the area of education, Campaign support has made it financially possible for more of the most promising students of all backgrounds to attend the School. And it has allowed us to increase the number of fully funded students admitted directly to the Harvard/MIT MD-PhD program, which trains the next generation of physician-scientists who will devote their careers to compassionate patient care and translational biomedical research.

73 new financial aid funds: 38 current-use and 35 endowed

In the area of discovery, private philanthropy and non-governmental grants secured directly by HMS faculty have advanced critical, curiosity-driven research that holds great promise toward enhancing, sustaining, and saving lives.

695 new research funds, including $168 million raised directly by HMS faculty

This funding has allowed us to explore novel approaches to therapeutic and regulatory science so that we can help make drug development cheaper, faster, and better. And it has enabled powerful, disease-based research partnerships between faculty at HMS and its affiliated hospitals, with the ultimate goal of benefiting patients on a local, national, and global scale.

69 new professorships: 12 based at HMS and 57 based at HMS-affiliated hospitals

One example of such a partnership is the Evergrande Center for Immunologic Diseases, a joint program of HMS and Brigham and Women’s Hospital established in 2013 thanks to support from the Evergrande Real Estate Group. The center brings together experts in biomedical research with a focus on understanding the role of chronic inflammation in multiple human diseases.

“This transformative gift has enabled the launch of the Evergrande Flagship Project on Colorectal Cancer. Bringing together clinical and research scientists across HMS and Harvard-affiliated institutions, the Flagship Project is advancing progress toward understanding an important disease for which there is a huge unmet medical need,” says Arlene Sharpe, AB ’75, AM ’76, PhD ’81, MD ’82, co-chair of the Department of Microbiology and Immunobiology, co-director of the Evergrande Center, and the George Fabyan Professor of Comparative Pathology at HMS.

Service initiatives bolstered by the Campaign include developing and implementing scalable global health programs that strengthen health systems and impact millions of lives. Funding in this area also advanced health care policy research, including nearly $20 million in grant funding from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation to support the new Healthcare Markets and Regulation Lab. And a $30 million gift from an anonymous donor spurred the launch of the HMS Center for Primary Care, which focuses on strengthening health systems through the transformation of primary care delivery, teams, and leaders.

In the area of leadership, unrestricted gifts provided former Dean Flier and current Dean George Q. Daley, AB ’82, MD ’91, PhD, with flexible funds that they could apply when and where they were most needed to spur innovation.

“Thank you to the members of the Harvard Medical School community for your generosity and commitment to our mission in action. There is no more audacious or worthy goal than transforming the future of human health and wellbeing. Your partnership and passion are critical as we work to live up to our values and be a force for good in the world,” says Daley.

View our Campaign Honor Roll of Donors »