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Spring 2009
Givers and Receivers
Where the Money Goes
 George Simmons (at left in photo) was a man of dazzling intelligence and ability. “He was genuinely creative, ambitious, hardworking, and prolific. I could see no end to his potential,” said Jason Finkle, emeritus professor of population planning in the School of Public Health. “I could imagine him rising politically wherever he went; he could have served in the U.S. government at a cabinet-level position.” “What was special about George’s brilliance is that it was never narrow. He could always see the issues in a larger context,” said his wife, HBHE Professor Emerita Ruth Simmons.
George Simmons, who died of a brain tumor at age 50 in 1990, left an indelible imprint on the field of global health and population planning. As a professor in what was then the Department of Population Planning and International Health at SPH, he was an economic demographer who did groundbreaking research, building collaborations with scholars around the globe.
While he was busy making national and international policy, Simmons was also a dedicated and much-loved teacher. “He taught to the last moment. He signed his last dissertation three days before he died,” Ruth Simmons said. “I think all his students came to dinner at least once.” The Population Planning Department was like a big family, she said, with a tradition of weekly social gatherings, and it was at one of these shortly before his death that George said farewell to his colleagues and students. “He said goodbye, he told them, ‘I love you all.’ And he did.”
Ever since Simmons’s death, the George Simmons Fund, started by his close SPH colleagues and supported by many of those students and professionals he touched over the years, has continued to provide financial support for SPH students in the field of international family planning.
As an undergraduate at Tufts, studying French and anthropology, Emily Pingel (M.P.H. ’09) says, “I was interested in public health, but I didn’t know it was public health.” Her first clue came when she took a course in medical anthropology, which looks at health and biomedicine
in cross-cultural contexts. After graduating, she married a Brazilian, and the couple led an adventurous few years shuttling between Boston and Brazil, teaching and working with different service organizations.
As she focused in on public health,
Pingel applied to the SPH Department
of Health Behavior and Health Education, where she studied sexual health in Latin America and in Latino communities in
the U.S.A. She credits Assistant Professor Mark Padilla as an “incredible influence.” As she prepares to graduate from the HBHE program, Pingel hopes to continue working with Latin American communities in a large urban area such
as Boston, San Francisco, or Chicago.
She is grateful for the HBHE George Simmons Fund award that helped fund her internship last summer through FELA (Field Experience in Latin America), a new program that sent seven SPH students to work in Latin America. She collaborated with an organization serving people with HIV and AIDS in Bogotá, Colombia. “It was an incredibly wonderful, and needless to say, intense experience,” Pingel says. “These people have an amazing amount of strength—the things
I learned the most from them were sort
of intangible.”
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