The director of the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at the Harvard Chan School of Public Health will step down on January 9, Dean Andrea Baccarelli informed the school community by email on Tuesday afternoon. The FXB Center will also narrow its focus to children’s health and rights, the dean said. “We believe we can accomplish more, and have greater impact,” he wrote, “if we go deeper in a primary area of focus.”
The move is consistent with Baccarelli’s previously articulated goals for the school in an era of constrained finances—to shrink but become more impactful. No school was more dependent on federal research funding than the Chan School.
But the narrowed mission could also affect an FXB Center initiative, the Palestine Program for Health and Human Rights, which had drawn controversy, particularly after the October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attacks in Israel and the ensuing war in Gaza. Both the FXB Center and its director, Mary Bassett ’74, have been accused of taking positions characterized as anti-Israel; both students and alumni interviewed for the University’s April 2025 report on antisemitism at Harvard cited the Palestine program as one-sided in its presentation of the conflict in Gaza.
In that report, one student complained that a series of high-profile FXB webinars demonized Israel by creating the impression that “Israel exists solely to oppress Palestinians, and nothing else.” Some students said that when they voiced concerns about this programming, they were asked, “Who is more marginalized, Jews or Palestinians?”—a response they interpreted as an attempt to invalidate their concerns. Elsewhere in the report, an alum who listened to an FXB webinar in November 2024 reported that one of the speakers asserted that “the IDF’s [Israel Defense Forces] charter is to target healthcare workers.”
“Notably,” the report went on, “every Jewish and non-Jewish student who raised concerns about the Palestine Program…also expressed either personal ambivalence or even opposition to the ongoing Israeli military operations in Gaza, as well as deep concern about the health and well-being of Palestinians.”
Harvard previously declined to renew a research collaboration with Birzeit University in the West Bank that was part of the Palestine Program for Human Rights but did not shut the initiative down entirely.
The FXB Center currently houses six initiatives:
- Childhood Protection
- Climate Change and Public Health Emergencies
- Distress Migration
- Palestine Program for Health and Human Rights
- Racial Justice Program
- Roma Program for Health and Human Rights
Asked whether each of these programs would remain while narrowing their focus to children or be disbanded, with the center’s sole focus shifting to Childhood Protection, a spokesperson for the public health school declined to elaborate, instead referring the question to the dean’s message.
Bassett, a 1979 graduate of Harvard Medical School who has run the FXB Center for the past seven years, was informed just a few hours before the dean’s email was sent that she would be replaced, the Crimson reported. According to the dean’s message, she will remain at the school as a professor of the practice in its Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences. Bassett did not immediately respond to a request to confirm that detail.
She will be succeeded on an interim basis by Rock professor of climate and population studies Kari Nadeau, a pediatrician who studies environmental impacts on health. Nadeau, also a professor of medicine, is currently chair of the school’s department of environmental health and will “lead a transition initiative at the FXB Center in the coming months,” Baccarelli wrote.
