Fellows Profile: Ruby P. Hearn

Ruby P. Hearn, PhD

Baltimore, MD

When Dr. Ruby Hearn was elected in 2004 as one of NYAM's six new Trustees, she had recently wrapped up a distinguished 25-year career at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the largest U.S. philanthropy dedicated to improving human health and healthcare. Hearn had risen through the ranks to become Senior Vice President, and while she always knew she had the capacity for such high achievement, her society didn’t. She was an African-American girl growing up in the south in the ‘40s and ‘50s, facing race- and gender-based biases from day one.

“I was born in the segregated south, and I experienced a lot of the impact of segregation firsthand,” 65-year-old Hearn said in a telephone interview from her Baltimore home. Those challenges shaped her lifelong passion to help disadvantaged populations, especially women and children, a pursuit she intends to continue as part of NYAM's governing structure. “For a very long time, I’ve been concerned about improving opportunities for everybody so that everybody could achieve their full potential,” said Hearn, who is also a NYAM Fellow. “We just learned as kids that this was important.”

Hearn, who ultimately went on to earn a PhD in biophysics from Yale University, was born to dynamic parents. Her mother was a professor at Morehouse College in Atlanta, exclusively attended by African-American men, and her father directed the National Urban League’s regional office in Atlanta. By the time Hearn entered high school in 1950s Atlanta, blacks and whites were still taught in separate facilities, so her parents sent her to Massachusetts to complete her last two years. At college, she was the only African-American in the entire school until junior year. “My parents were both teachers, and I knew that there were many talented people who did not have an opportunity for those talents to be developed,” she said.

At Yale, Hearn married her grad school sweetheart, Robert Hearn, and gave birth to two children. Hearn soon went to work at The Children’s Television Workshop, using her deep understanding of science to serve as a liaison between the medical community and the program “Feeling Good,” one of the earliest efforts to develop health education on television. It was professionally satisfying and also scored points at home. “My kids were so excited when I told them I was going to see Big Bird and Cookie Monster. They got to meet them,” she recalled. The program was supported in part by The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and through this serendipitous connection, the groundwork was laid for Ruby Hearn’s career at the Foundation to begin in 1976.

Robert Wood Johnson had built the small family firm of Johnson & Johnson into the world's largest health and medical care products conglomerate and upon his death, left nearly all of his immense fortune to his philanthropy. The Foundation had yet to clearly define its mission in the early years after its 1972 founding, and only a handful of employees were yet on board. Hearn was able to design major programs to ameliorate health and social problems that disproportionately impact minorities, women and children, including inadequate prenatal care, a lack of health insurance, and the scourges of AIDS and drug abuse. She built her name among health policy leaders nationwide—culminating with her election to the Institute of Medicine, one of the highest honors in healthcare—by successfully pursuing that agenda through her 2001 retirement.

“I was so lucky to join the Foundation when it was so small that literally every one of us had lunch around the same table,” Hearn said. That daily lunch bunch included a handful of program officers like herself dining side by side with Vice President Margaret Mahoney and the late David E. Rogers, M.D., the Foundation’s first President. “The Foundation gave me an incredible opportunity to pursue some of the things I felt passionate about. I was there with people who all cared so much about making the world a better place.”

Dr. Hearn said she feels a very similar opportunity as one of NYAM's newest Trustees. "I was very honored to be asked to join the board,” said Hearn, who first met NYAM President Jeremiah A. Barondess, MD, a close friend and colleague of Dr. Rogers, while working at the Foundation. “I have long admired the Academy and over the years the Foundation has been a supporter of the Academy’s work. During Dr. Barondess’s tenure, he has revitalized the Academy, especially with its focus on urban health.”

Urban health is still not receiving the level of attention it warrants, Hearn said. But NYAM is a driving force in defining society’s most corrosive health problems and leading the charge to remedy them. “Sadly, a lot of the things we were worrying about more than 25 years ago when I joined the Foundation, we’re still worrying about, and these problems all disproportionately impact urban populations,” she said.

The health problems endured by children and the elderly are also under-addressed because these groups cannot effectively advocate for themselves. “The young and the old are populations that increasingly are dependent on the actions of others,” Hearn said. This is a reality she feels more acutely now that she is a senior citizen, her frail father is 90, and she has two young grandchildren. In that regard, Hearn now serves on the Advisory Committee to the American Academy of Pediatrics’ Center for Child Health Research, and is Vice Chair of the Board of Directors for the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, which strives to improve healthcare systems and treatment worldwide.

Hearn characterizes the Academy agenda as “very broad and comprehensive,” and the research staff as “a wonderful group of people.” “Academy scientists are developing the knowledge base that can then be applied by people on the front lines,” Hearn said. Since joining the Board of Trustees, she has served on the oversight committee to NYAM's year-old Office of Policy Development, which works to translate NYAM research into public policy. She is also a member of the audit committee.

Serving on the Board is a responsibility that Hearn intends to be long and meaningful. One of the challenges she will embrace going forward is to help make the institution’s work better known—an obstacle she helped the once-unknown Robert Wood Johnson Foundation successfully overcome. “Having people more aware of what you’re doing broadens support of your work and can be helpful to you in achieving your goals,” Hearn said. “My hope is that I will find ways to contribute to the work of the Academy, which is important to the city, state, and nation.”

Member of Section(s):
Health Care Delivery