It’s a warm, sunny Friday, the kind of day that makes people who visit here wish they lived in Southern California, and the soon-to-be chancellor of the most prestigious public university in the country and his wife are taking a stroll down Bruin Walk. The campus is quiet; no one seems to really note their presence. In January, of course, that will all change. Quickly.
In June, Julio Frenk, president of the University of Miami, was named the seventh chancellor of UCLA, and it is now, in the months before he officially assumes that role, that he is taking time to get to know the campus. Or, perhaps more accurately, to feel it — its hum, its beauty, its life. A passionate lover of opera, he and his spouse, Dr. Felicia Knaul, a health economist who directs the Institute for Advanced Study of the Americas at the University of Miami, are heading into the baronial Evelyn and Mo Ostin Music Center recording studios, a mini Disney Hall tucked away near the Inverted Fountain just north of the Paul R. Williams–designed Pritzker Hall.
They’re here to listen to the talents of Rakefet Hak, the music director for Opera UCLA, who performs a solo from the beginning of Act Two of Mozart’s seminal work The Marriage of Figaro. This, in turn, leads to an improvised jam that includes UCLA master’s of music candidate Virginia Douglas gorgeously singing the aria “Porgi, Amor,” and then master’s of music candidate Romeo Lopez taking on Jules Massenet’s haunting “Ah! Fuyez, douce image,” from the French opera Manon.
Soprano Douglas and tenor Lopez climb delicate vocal ladders, as Hak complements the swirling crescendo of emotion. Frenk, eyes slightly closed and wearing a bemused smile, stands at attention in the 4,300-square- foot recording studio. When the performances end, he utters the only word that seems appropriate.
“Bravo!” he bellows, his applause suitable for a box seat at the Met.
Afterward, the group talks earnestly — Frenk leans in, listens first, digs deeper. They talk about the intricacies of the vocal performance, about the art form of opera itself, about Frenk’s hearty collection of 400 opera recordings, about how when he was a child his mother used to practice piano concertos with a recording of the orchestral accompaniment for hours.
It’s an exhilarating discussion. And evidence that while they maintain relationships with friends and colleagues in Miami they will always hold dear, the couple is excited to be transitioning to what is, for them, brand-new terrain: UCLA, Los Angeles, a new life. They bring with them not only their own unique lived experience — Frenk is a distinguished public health researcher, Knaul a globally recognized health economist — but a warmth, grace and optimism that collectively brim with Bruin values.
For now, Frenk and Knaul are enjoying their anonymity on campus; come spring, everyone will want a selfie. Still, even now the pair have a presence about them, so when they drop into the ever-present line at Kerckhoff Coffee House, students drift about, stealing the occasional look. One tells Knaul how much she adores her flowing, Coachella-esque dress.
At the back of the S-curve of the line, Knaul gently tugs on her husband’s jacket sleeve, prompting him to strike up a conversation with two students sitting at a two-top. Frenk and Knaul are on a tight schedule today, something to be expected of the chancellor-designate and his partner. But you can see they are eager to hear from the UCLA community. So, despite being ushered to move on to their next appointment, the couple stops to chat with the two students, who turn out to be well-informed political science majors.
First-year Laila Salam isn’t shy about using her opportunity to ask Frenk what his top priority will be.
Bringing the campus together, he says. To anyone who knows Frenk, that answer isn’t a surprise. In making the announcement of his appointment, University of California President Michael Drake noted Frenk’s “powerful commitment to the health and well-being of people.”
“That is a hefty goal,” Salam replies.
Yes, it is. And hefty goals take time. Which is why, for months, Frenk has been living bicoastally, making strategic visits to the Westwood campus every few weeks to meet, learn, research, prepare. He’s hardly intimidated by the task. Formidable goals were intertwined with both Frenk and Knaul’s lives even before they met 30 years ago. Their partnership only reinforced what might be described as a global, public health mission lifestyle.
Born in Mexico, Frenk earned his medical degree from the National Autonomous University of Mexico before deciding to pursue a broader education in public health and sociology at the University of Michigan. His career took him from the Mexican Health Foundation to the World Health Organization in Geneva and back to Mexico, where he became the Minister of Health before going on to Boston as dean of Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He has been at the helm of the University of Miami for the past decade, and under his leadership the university’s health system experienced a dramatic turnaround. Frenk led efforts to raise billions of dollars for the university, while also steering it into membership in the AAU.
Knaul and Frenk met in 1995, after she gave a presentation for the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies on her doctoral thesis research, on working with kids living on the streets in Guatemala and Colombia. It didn’t take long for them to see how they fit together: They shared not only a devotion to using public health to improve people’s lives, but also family narratives that drove both of them into public service.
Over coffee, they chat about things they love to do together (walks on the beach), hobbies (searching for kaleidoscopes, for one), what they’ll miss most about Miami (friendships). But you can clearly sense that while they truly endeavor to enjoy life to the fullest, Frenk and Knaul are serious, dedicated people who never drift far from their belief in mission, in service.
It prompts me to ask Frenk a simple question: What inspires you?
“I have many inspirations,” he says thoughtfully. “But you know, the original one, which I always think of as the defining event in my life, is the fact that my grandparents had to flee from Germany in the 1930s.”
His grandparents fled the rising antisemitism with Julio’s father (then 6 years old) and his aunt (who was 4), eventually finding refuge in Mexico. His immigrant story is reflected on his mother’s side as well — she and her family were also immigrants to Mexico. Her father, Julio’s namesake, emigrated when he was 11 from the Canary Islands of Spain.
“My father and his parents arrived to this land on the other side of the ocean,” Frenk says. “They looked very different. They spoke very differently. They prayed differently. They were different in almost every dimension. And yet that country was generous to them.”
It’s that idea that Frenk wants to foster here at UCLA. “My big inspiration is the idea of generosity to strangers,” he says. “It is easy to be generous to family and friends. It is very hard to be generous to people who are very different from you. But that’s what saved my grandparents and my father. And made my own life possible.”
It mirrors the inspiration of Knaul’s life as well, and her own father’s journey. Originally from Toronto, she was led to Central and South America by the desire to work on behalf of children at high risk, driven by her father’s ordeal of being interned for five years from the age of 15 in concentration camps in Germany and Poland.
“Let me start there, because that really is the way of explaining why I do what I do,” she says. “When you grew up as the child of genocide — which is what I am, the child of a Holocaust survivor — the world is a very frightening place.” For her, the only way she could imagine making that world less frightening was to do something to change it for the better. “What matters,” she says, “is that our world is one of tremendous avoidable suffering, and that something can be done about that.”
Knaul’s father died when she was only 18; it was her mother, Marie, an immigrant who lived through the World War II bombings in London, who provided the stability that propelled her forward in her education and career. Knaul earned her master’s and Ph.D. in economics from Harvard; her mentor there, and a leader of her dissertation committee, was the Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen. Later, Knaul became an associate professor in Harvard’s Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, and she led the Harvard Global Equity Initiative.
For all of the academic roles and honors and travels, the idea of family — how it binds us, how it connects us to something more powerful than us — remains top of mind for both Frenk and Knaul. One of seven children, Frenk talks often about his family: a brother, the cosmologist; the five talented sisters (including a twin) whose fields include medicine, counseling and music; an aunt who is a renowned philologist (scholar of linguistics). Knaul has one brother, a Canadian Armed Forces pilot who served in Kosovo and Afghanistan and who is now flying out of Mojave. The couple has two daughters, Sofia Hannah and Mariana Havivah — Mariana joined them on their recent excursion to campus — and Frenk also has two sons, Esteban and Emilio. They have worked diligently to instill these values around connection in all of their children.
“You can have deep roots, and you can have more than one set of roots, and you can build new roots,” Frenk says. “You can move to a new community, like I’m doing now in Los Angeles. And you know, you’re not denying your previous roots. You’re honoring them.”
Spoken like someone who remains extremely grateful that his grandparents were welcomed to a foreign land, to a new home. And who looks forward to building a new home at UCLA as well.
Read more from UCLA Magazine’s Fall 2024 issue.