While it wasn’t the goodbye Dr. Robert S. Gold hoped for (due to COVID), the School of Public Health recognized his retirement from the University of Maryland and celebrated his legacy as the SPH’s founding dean with a heartfelt Zoom tribute in May. Attended by legions of colleagues and former students, the event gave the SPH community a chance to thank Dr. Gold (known to many as simply “Bob”) and his wife Barbara for their many contributions to making the school what it is today—a top 20 school of public health with a diverse and growing student body dedicated to fearlessly promoting health for all. Widely recognized for being an early proponent and innovator in the use of technology to promote health, Bob has been a mentor and inspiration to more than 40 doctoral students and countless others at the master’s and undergraduate level throughout his career.
This Spring, Bob and Barbara Gold traded their rancher home in University Park, Md. for a tricked out Ford cargo van in which they plan to live and travel most months of the year. They have already logged more than 7,000 miles and are spending the next few months chasing the peak fall foliage on a 5,000-mile adventure that will include spending time in New York’s Thousand Islands, visiting friends in College Park, driving the entirety of Skyline Drive and the Blue Ridge Parkway and cheering on the Terps women’s basketball team wherever they are playing.
Made possible in part by downsizing their primary residence, Bob and Barbara chose to give a new gift to the University of Maryland upon Bob’s retirement— totaling $100,000—to support the School of Public Health and Women’s Athletics. In the School of Public Health, the gifts will help support the School of Public Health Student Emergency Scholarship, the Department of Behavioral and Community Health and the Robert S. Gold & Barbara A. Gold Public Health Innovation Award.
“We are concerned about all the people that have had difficulty during the pandemic, and wanted to provide a gift to the emergency fund at the school level for students who may have been struggling over the last two years. We want to make sure that nobody loses an opportunity because they couldn't pay a medical bill or buy textbooks,” Bob said of their commitment to helping students in need.
Among the many leadership roles Dr. Gold held over his 30+ years at UMD, he was most recently the chair of the Department of Behavioral and Community Health (BCH). Bob shared that giving money to the BCH gift fund was one way he could support Dr. Craig Fryer, the interim department chair who took over leadership in July.
“As a new chair with his first experience at this, we wanted to give Craig some flexibility and access to discretionary funds that he has control over,” he said, noting the budget difficulties that many departments are facing.
The Golds launched their eponymous Public Health Innovation Award in 2017, with an initial gift of $100,000, to encourage students to think of innovative solutions to complex problems in public health and reward the best ideas with start-up funding. “We want to ensure that the Gold Award could continue,” Bob said, noting the challenges of sustaining the competition during the pandemic.
“It’s really about how to address public health problems in a way that tired old thinking hasn’t been able to. I’m interested to see if anyone will come up with creative thinking around a project related to diversity and inclusion. It’s also an ideal opportunity for people to think creatively about health literacy and the role it plays in misinformation and how to combat people who have weaponized misinformation about public health. Young people ought to be all over this.”