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At BU, one of the goals of we have as a University is to try to find backing for more chairs.
These are very important milestones for our professors, our faculty.
My family foundation decided to make this endowment. The chair is for the Center for
Global Health and Development, and Jon Simon is the professor that will have the chair.
It's a tremendous honor to be the inaugural Robert Knox professor. The guy is a doer.
That's been the story of his life.
And I think he found the Center and its mission attractive in part because we're trying to
do real practical things to improve the health of populations around the world.
If you're involved with health care, it's hard not to be aware of the incredible chronic
diseases, problems of poverty, and issues in less developed countries.
What Jon's group does, it's applied research, so it's very, very practical.
The Center has a long-standing tradition of working on the diseases that affect children
around the world. And I think Bob Knox was particularly interested to learn that of the
estimated 10 million children who die every year before their fifth birthday,
80% of those could be saved if we used the known tools and technologies that we have
available to us.
There's a large body of work where we've taken the tools and technologies that save lives
and push them down the occupational hierarchy to get community health workers and families
to save the lives of their children.
The best example of that, I think is probably our work on pneumonia where we've shown that
community health workers, if they follow a standard algorithm, can manage pneumonia in
a community setting and save numerous lives.
If that can be done on a consistent, repeatable basis, across the developing world, then it's
a transformative impact in terms of the mortality of those children.
The work that Jon does, I think it's inspirational, so I'm very proud to be a small part of what
he does.