Making the Difference
Dennis and Joan Gillings
Doing good at the School of Public Health
By Scott Ragland (with reporting from the University Gazette)
When Chancellor James Moeser announced the news that the Carolina First Campaign had broken its $2 billion goal, he noted that “we didn’t just break $2 billion—we broke it with a bang.”
The bang came courtesy of Dennis Gillings and his wife, Joan Gillings.
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| From left, Campaign Co-Chair Paul Fulton, Chancellor James Moeser, Joan Gillings, Dennis Gillings and Campaign Co-Chair Charlie Shaffer celebrate the day that Carolina First topped $2 billion— Feb. 21, 2007. |
The couple pledged $50 million, the largest single commitment in University history, to support the School of Public Health. In recognition of that extraordinary generosity, the school will be renamed the Gillings School of Global Public Health.
“There are few individuals in this world who answer the call to do the unique, the transformative and who by their actions illustrate the breadth and depth of their aspirations to help others” the way the Gillingses have done, Moeser said.
School of Public Health Dean Barbara K. Rimer also called the gift “transformative.”
“We at the school and the Gillingses share a commitment to solve public health problems in North Carolina and around the world,” she said. “And we want these solutions to come faster and be more sustainable.”
A former UNC biostatistics professor, Dennis Gillings is chairman and CEO of Quintiles Transnational Corp., the world’s leading pharmaceutical services company, based in Research Triangle Park, N.C. Joan Gillings has had careers in public health, including at the School of Public Health, and commercial real estate.
“The School of Public Health has been a part of our lives for a long, long time, and we see that it could do a lot of good,” Joan said. “The school is going places. It’s got great leadership right now and the world is changing a great deal and hopefully this will make a difference and we will see the ‘public’ put back into the School of Public Health. So, we are excited about the future of the school.”
One thing Dennis hopes the $50 million pledge will enable the school to develop is a “new methodology” to speed the delivery of medicines to the people who need them.
“We are an incredibly inventive world right now—biotechnology and genetics will make, certainly for our grandchildren if not sooner, a whole new medicine,” he said. “Now the trouble is that new medicine—bringing it to people—is very difficult. You have problems of testing and are these drugs safe and should they be limited in any way.”
The School of Public Health will use the Gillings’ gift to tackle such issues with “Innovation Laboratories.” These will focus on solving big public health problems—in fact, the first will be a Center for Innovative Clinical Trials that will develop new methods to collect and analyze data from clinical trials, and then quickly make these scientific advances available to researchers, practitioners, the biomedical community and the public as a whole.
And that’s just the sort of thing the Gillingses had in mind.
“We think this is a great campus in which [practical solutions can be found for real problems],” Dennis said. “It has shown great leadership to the rest of the world, the nation and certainly the state of North Carolina.”
Born in London, Dennis came to the United States and to Carolina “sight unseen” to take a faculty appointment in the School of Public Health’s biostatistics department in 1971. He got here, he said, thanks to his father and chancellor’s office staff who worked on getting him an H1 visa to get into the country while he was away many months on an African safari.
“I had to borrow $1,000 to get here,” he added.
While at the school, Dennis and others applied the latest methodologies to analyze clinical trial data for pharmaceutical companies. He created Quintiles in 1982.
Dennis and Joan said they felt a need to give back to a school that had given him so much, and their $50 million commitment built on generous past donations, including a $3 million gift to the Department of Biostatistics. That gift, supplemented by the state’s Distinguished Professors Endowment Trust Fund, endowed the Dennis Gillings Professorship in Biostatistics.
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