Linda P. Fried

Linda P. Fried (born 1949) is an American geriatrician and epidemiologist, who was also the first female Dean of Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health. Her research career is focused on frailty, healthy aging, and how society can successfully transition to benefit from an aging population.

Early life and education She attended Hunter College High School and earned a bachelor's degree in history from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1970. She received her M.D. from Rush Medical College in Chicago in 1979 and her M.P.H. at Johns Hopkins in 1984, where she worked with Paul Whelton. She trained in internal medicine at Rush Presbyterian-St. Luke's Medical Center in Chicago. After fellowship training in internal medicine, she expanded her focus to the aging population and received a fellowship in Hopkins's geriatrics program.

Career In 1985, Fried accepted joint faculty appointments in the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and School of Hygiene and Public Health. She then served as director of geriatric medicine and was the founding director of the Johns Hopkins Center on Aging and Health, which studies the epidemiology of aging, relationships between aging and health, and interventions to improve health with aging. In 2008, Fried became the first female Dean of Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health, DeLamar Professor of Epidemiology; professor of medicine at Columbia's College of Physicians and Surgeons; and senior vice president of Columbia University Medical Center.

Aging research and programs Prior to Fried's work, frailty was an ambiguous medical term commonly referring to a number of ailments and disabilities. Fried developed biologically-based theory regarding the clinical presentation or phenotype of frailty and hypotheses regarding its etiology in dysregulation of genes and some physiologic systems. She has led scientific teams that developed an assessment tool and created a more concrete definition of frailty. Fried also instigated a number of key studies on the cause of frailty and has proposed and developed the idea of a frailty syndrome. Christine K. Cassel, president and chief executive officer of the American Board of Internal Medicine noted that Fried's work, "has become core knowledge and core teaching in every geriatric program" in the country.

In the early 1990s, Fried collaborated with the social activist Marc Freedman and others to design and develop a nationwide volunteer program called Experience Corps. The program trains adult volunteers, ages 55 and older, to improve the academic success of students in economically disadvantaged public elementary schools. Fried and Freedman codesigned the program to have a social impact with children and schools and as a public health intervention to improve the health of older-adult volunteers. A 2009 study using functional magnetic resonance imaging showed that participants experienced short-term gains in executive cognitive function compared with a control group. The program now exists in 19 cities across the United States under the aegis of AARP.

In 2012, The New York Times included her as one of 15 world leaders in science. Fried stepped down from her role as dean in 2025, but remains on faculty at the Mailman School of Public Health.

Innovations In 2011, she was instrumental in bringing the International Longevity Center, a research and advocacy center on aging that was founded by the late Robert N. Butler, to Columbia University. Fried led the School to build the nation's first program in a school of public health on climate and health and graduate degrees in this field and established the Global Consortium on Climate and Health Education; she launched the Lerner Center for Public Health Promotion, Columbia Public Health Corporate Partnerships, the Program in Global Health Justice and Governance, established a leading program in Data Science for Health. Among many other innovations, Fried has led the school in the creation of research and educational initiatives on obesity prevention, system science, and public health approaches to preventing incarceration. and the MacArthur Network on an Aging Society. She was the co-chair of the 2019-2022 National Academy of Medicine initiative for a Global Roadmap for Healthy Longevity.

2001–present, Elected Member, National Academy of Sciences Institute of Medicine 2001–present, Elected Member, Association of American Physicians 2018 Lifetime Achievement Award, International Conference on Frailty and Sarcopenia 2019 The Alma Morani Renaissance Woman Award, Women in Medicine Legacy Foundation 2022 Kober Medal, Association of American Physicians 2022 Named "Best Female Scientist" by Research.com Present means as of 2023

Publications Between 2014 and 2021, the top areas of focus in articles in Gerontology (39.67%), Public health (12.73%) and Internal medicine (29.70%). According to ResearchGate, she has, as of 2023, published 645 publications and has been cited 98,201 times.

Google Scholar lists these as Fried's other most cited articles:

Frailty Consensus: A Call to Action cited 3675 Untangling the Concepts of Disability, Frailty, and Comorbidity: Implications for Improved Targeting and Care cited 4609 Clinical Practice Guidelines and Quality of Care for Older Patients With Multiple Comorbid Diseases cited 3067 The cardiovascular health study: Design and rationale cited 2364 Frailty: implications for clinical practice and public health cited 1160

Books and book chapters Partial list:

Measuring Loss of Homeostasis in Aging Etiological Role of Aging in Chronic Diseases: From Epidemiological Evidence to the New Geroscience Experience Corps®: A Civic Engagement-Based Public Health Intervention in the Public Schools Inflammatory Markers and Frailty Organizational Change to Support Success of Women