Marsha Wills-Karp to Chair Department of Environmental Health Sciences

Marsha Wills-Karp, PhD, a leader in the study of the molecular mechanisms of asthma, has been selected to chair the Department of Environmental Health Sciences at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Wills-Karp will join the Bloomberg School on January 1, 2012, and assume her full duties as Department chair on March 1, 2012.

“Marsha is an outstanding scientist and leader and we are very fortunate to recruit her to this position,” said Michael J. Klag, MD, MPH, dean of the Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Wills-Karp is currently professor and the founding director of the Division of Immunobiology in the Department of Pediatrics at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. She also directs the Immunobiology Graduate Program at Cincinnati. Wills-Karp previously worked at Johns Hopkins as a postdoctoral fellow from 1987 to 1990 and was a member of the faculty from 1990 to 2000.

Wills-Karp is a graduate of Southwest Texas State University. She earned her doctorate from the University of California, Santa Barbara and completed postdoctoral training at Yale University.

Wills-Karp succeeds John Groopman, MD, who led the Bloomberg School’s Department of Environmental Health Sciences for 19 years. Groopman will remain with the Bloomberg School and will the lead the department’s new Center in Epigenetics and Public Health.

“John has been a superb chair and a great colleague. He has a broad and deep vision. Under his leadership, the Department of Environmental Health Sciences has had an impact in Baltimore and around the world,” said Klag.

Wills-Karp was selected following a nationwide search led by Pierre Coulombe, PhD, the E.V. McCollum Professor and Chair of the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the Bloomberg School of Public Health.