Strom is the inaugural chancellor of Rutgers Biomedical and Health Sciences and originally appeared on the NJBIZ Health Care Power List in 2014.
He has been in the spotlight much more recently due to RBHS’s role in New Jersey’s contact tracing program along with its study early on in the pandemic on COVID-19’s effect on health care workers, which found that women were infected at a rate of 13 times their male counterparts, perhaps due to existing disparity in the nursing workforce which includes more women than men.
During his six years at Rutgers, Strom has spearheaded the creation of an interprofessional faculty practice group, the Rutgers Health Group; established a formal partnership with RWJBarnabas Health to create New Jersey’s largest and most comprehensive academic health system; and headed a major recruitment drive to bring biomedical researchers and clinicians to Rutgers. In the past year under his direction, research awards for Rutgers Biomedical and Health Sciences, which includes Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, Rutgers New Jersey Medical School and other schools, jumped from $296.5 million to $390.8 million, or 31.8%, from fiscal 2018 to fiscal 2019.
In addition, Rutgers received a $29 million award and joined the National Institutes of Health’s Clinical and Translational Science Awards Program – the first time New Jersey has received this funding, which will expand clinical trials, develop new treatments and therapies, and attract a new scientific workforce to the state.
Before joining the university, Strom was the executive vice dean of institutional affairs, founding chair of the Depart-ment of Biostatistics and Epidemiology, founding director of the Center for Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics, and founding director of the Graduate Program in Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the Perelman School of Medicine of the University of Pennsylvania.
