The University of California, Irvine, will establish Orange County’s first population and public health school, school officials announced Thursday following approval by the University of California Board of Regents.
The monument will bear the name of the Joe C. Wen School of Population and Public Health, in honor of the $50 million that Wen and his family donated to the university.
“When we created the Susan and Henry Samueli College of Health Sciences, UC Irvine committed to elevating all of our health science programs to full schools,” said university president Howard Gilman. “I am pleased that the Board of Trustees has completed the final part of that commitment.”
The Susan and Henry Samueli University of Health Sciences also includes the Sue and Bill Gross School of Nursing, the Susan Samueli Institute for Integrative Health, the School of Medicine and the School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences.
Plans for using the endowment include establishing two endowments. The bulk of the gift, $42.5 million, will fund priorities for the new School of Public Health, the fourth school of public health in the UC system. The remaining funds will help advance cardiology research and clinical operations in both the School of Medicine and the UCI Health System.
The cardiology department at UC Irvine’s School of Medicine will be named after Wen’s parents, Mary and Steve, and the Cardiovascular Center at UC Irvine Medical Center in Orange will also be renamed in honor of Wen’s grandfather, Tsai Ya Au.
“Commitment to medical and educational advancement is a core value of our family,” Wen said. “We are honored to support UC Irvine in its mission to improve medical care and advance education and research, and to continue its tradition of compassion and compassion for future generations.”
The Joe C. Wen School of Population and Public Health has several departments, including Environmental and Occupational Health, Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Health, Social and Behavioral, and Population Health and Disease Prevention. Students can enroll in nine degree programs.
The school, which has 57 public health professors, has a research and operating budget of $38 million.
“UC’s support for our program to become a school, along with this incredibly generous gift from Joe C. Wen, will increase our visibility among schools and programs of public health nationally,” said Bernadette Borden Albala, founding dean of the Joe C. Wen School of Population and Public Health. “The hard work and dedication of our faculty, students and the entire campus to becoming a school will be further recognized by this transformational gift.”
Wen and his family donated $20 million to UCI Health in 2022 to open an outpatient facility in Irvine. The Joe C. Wen Family Center for Advanced Care opened on campus in April.
Mr. Wen emigrated from Taiwan as a teenager, earned a BA from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and an MBA from the University of Southern California (USC), and currently runs Formosa Ltd., an international conglomerate and real estate developer with businesses across multiple industries.
