The University of California, Los Angeles on Tuesday named as its next dean of public health the head of a Harvard University center that was hit with numerous anti-Semitism allegations in a university report last year.
Kari Nadeau, the chair of the environmental health department at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, will leave Harvard for UCLA just months after she became the interim director of the Harvard François-Xavier Bagnoud (FXB) Center for Health and Human Rights. The FXB center’s previous director, Mary Bassett, resigned in January, and Nadeau was tapped to replace her.
The FXB Center and its Palestine Program for Health and Human Rights were a focus of the report issued in April 2025 by Harvard’s task force on anti-Semitism. Over the weekend, a program sponsored by the FXB Center featured a speaker who demonized Israeli doctors as “pro-genocide.”
Though most of the incidents took place before Nadeau was named interim director, the weekend’s event makes clear that at least some of that programming has continued under her stewardship. The task force’s report described a hostile climate for Jewish students at the school of public health, which houses the FXB center and features a course on the “Settler Colonial Determinants of Health.”
“One student told us that the FXB programming created the impression that ‘Israel exists solely to oppress Palestinians, and nothing else,'” the anti-Semitism report reads. A speaker at a November 2024 webinar described in the report claimed that the “IDF’s charter is to target healthcare workers.” Students who raised concerns about the center’s programming were allegedly asked, “who is more marginalized, Jews or Palestinians,” and noted that there were “no programs on the ‘public health consequences of rockets being fired or suicide bombings.'”
Nadeau, a pediatrician by training, will assume the UCLA post in July. In a statement announcing her appointment, the university praised Nadeau for her “inclusive, student-centered approach to preparing the next generation of public health leaders.” UCLA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Nadeau’s appointment comes as the Trump administration is suing UCLA over a string of controversial incidents, including a guest lecture by an “activist-in-residence,” Lisa Gray-Garcia, who led chants of “Free, Free Palestine” in a mandatory class for first-year medical students. The university was hit with a separate lawsuit this week after it stonewalled a public records request about Gray-Garcia, who has referred to the Oct. 7 attacks as “justice” and described the University of California, San Francisco, as a “Zionist funded akkkademik institution.”
Nadeau’s short time as FXB director got off to an awkward start. She stepped in to replace Bassett, who lost her job at the center in the wake of Harvard’s anti-Semitism report, prompting a petition from students and faculty that accused Harvard of racism.
“This targeted dismissal follows a series of politically motivated terminations of leaders at Harvard’s scholarly centers that include programming on Palestine,” the petition read. “This decision … also reflects a deeper, troubling pattern of targeted erasure–especially of Black women whose scholarship confronts structural violence and insists on the dignity of marginalized peoples, including Palestinians.”
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