Lainie Rutkow, JD, MPH, PhD

Lainie Rutkow serves as interim provost at Johns Hopkins University. She is a professor of health policy and management at the Bloomberg School of Public Health and the School of Advanced International Studies. As interim provost, Dr. Rutkow oversees ten schools as well as numerous interdisciplinary programs, academic centers, and support functions, and works closely with President Daniels to advance the ambitious goals of the Ten for One strategic plan. She is committed to maintaining Hopkins’ institutional momentum, including stewarding its robust pipeline of strategic initiatives; elevating the University’s research, teaching, and outreach mission; and investing in faculty development and success at all stages in their careers.

In her nearly twenty-five years at Johns Hopkins, Dr. Rutkow has served as executive vice provost, vice provost for interdisciplinary initiatives, and senior advisor to the president for strategic initiatives. As executive vice provost, her work touched faculty affairs, student affairs, admissions and financial aid, student health and well-being, and institutional equity. At the Bloomberg School of Public Health, she has served as director of the Center for Law and the Public’s Health, associate chair of the Department of Health Policy and Management, director of the Sommer Scholars fellowship program, and director of the doctoral program in health and public policy. From 2019 to 2023, Dr. Rutkow led the strategic and academic planning for the University’s expansion in Washington, DC, including the operational, financial, and organizational models for development of the Hopkins Bloomberg Center, where she also launched the Nexus Awards for faculty-led research, the Hopkins Semester in DC program, and the Irene and Richard Frary Library. She was also integrally involved in establishing the School of Government and Policy, Johns Hopkins’ first new academic division since 2007.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, Dr. Rutkow led the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center, an interdisciplinary resource center featuring reliable Covid-19 data and expert guidance from every division of the university. Viewed over 2.5 billion times and dubbed “2020’s go-to data source” by TIME, the Center worked closely with local public health leaders, as well as governments around the world to support real-time policymaking. The Center also reached hundreds of thousands of viewers through public and media briefings, like the Johns Hopkins 30-Minute Covid-19 Briefing, in which Dr. Rutkow was a regular participant.

Dr. Rutkow is a nationally and internationally recognized public health law scholar whose work focuses on assessing how law influences public health outcomes. A bridge-builder between academia and government, she was the inaugural visiting scholar with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Public Health Law Program from 2016 to 2019. She works regularly and closely with bipartisan policymakers from the local to the national level and has led key evaluations of U.S. states’ policy efforts to promote emergency preparedness, address opioid use disorders, and mitigate childhood obesity.

As a scholar, Dr. Rutkow has authored over 130 peer-reviewed publications in law, policy, and biomedical journals, and writes regularly for practitioner and public audiences. Her work has been supported by the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and American Heart Association.

Dr. Rutkow holds an M.P.H. and Ph.D. from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, a J.D. from New York University School of Law, and a B.A. from Yale University in Comparative Literature and History of Science and Medicine. She is a member of the bar in the state of New York.