Julio Frenk, a Mexican public health expert who has led the University of Miami since 2015, was named on Wednesday as the next chancellor of the University of California, Los Angeles. He will oversee an elite public institution still reeling from intense protests and a violent attack on student demonstrators that occurred this spring.
Dr. Frenk will become the first Latino to lead U.C.L.A., whose student body is one of American higher education’s most diverse. He will succeed Gene Block, who will step down at the end of July. Dr. Block’s 17-year tenure saw the university enhance its academic reputation by attracting more research dollars and top-notch students, but it ended with outcry over his administration’s response to pro-Palestinian demonstrations.
Dr. Frenk, 70, was born in Mexico City — his grandparents had fled Germany in the 1930s — and was Mexico’s secretary of health from 2002 to 2006. Soon after, he became the dean of Harvard’s School of Public Health; he left that post in 2015 to take over at the University of Miami.
Every previous chancellor of U.C.L.A has been a white male, a record that stood in contrast to the school’s rich history of racial and ethnic diversity. The city’s first Black mayor, Tom Bradley, was an alumnus, as were the athletic and civil rights icons Jackie Robinson and Arthur Ashe.
Dr. Frenk will not become chancellor until January. The University of California Board of Regents appointed Darnell Hunt, the executive vice chancellor and provost of U.C.L.A., to serve as interim chancellor starting in August and lasting until Dr. Frenk arrives.
