A $3 million gift from a Rutgers University alumni will create a first of its kind program at the school to focus on LGBTQ plus public health issues.

Alumnus James Dougherty donated the money in the hopes of giving Rutgers a permanent champion for LGBTQ rights and named the Endowed Chair a prestigious honor.

After Perry Halkitis is the dean of the Rutgers School of Public Health, who has laid much of the groundwork both for the University and the state on public policy surrounding the LGBTQ community.

I asked Perry Halkitis what his plans are for the chair ship and how he envisions it improving lives.

Perry, welcome to the show.

This is a really big honor that Perry Halkitis endowed chair in LGBTQ plus public health.

What are your plans for it?

So thank you for that, for acknowledging that the plans for it are to make sure that the school public health at Rutgers always is addressing LGBTQ health issues.

These are issues that are often forgotten public health.

They're forgotten in health care.

And what this ensures is that I will be able to, in the short term, and the school will in the long term, always have somebody on board who is thinking about these issues from an educational perspective, from a research perspective, and from a community engagement perspective.

You've already done a lot at the university in terms of public health and looking at a lot of these issues.

So where do you go from here?

You've got a $5 million pot of money between the donation and some extra money that the chancellor is kicking in.

How do you expand the type of not just resources but also how you plan to influence public policy?

Yeah, so what we're thinking about is creating a site that's even bigger than what's there right now, a site that provides education across the university to our students who are medical school students or public health students that does research and provides seed money to get even bigger grants from the National Science of Health.

But also the policy piece and the policy piece I think is critically important here, because very often the research stays in the papers and doesn't get translated.

We know in the state of New Jersey we're lucky because last year we were able to collect start collecting Soji data, sexual orientation and gender identity data on folks as they going to their health care providers.

But there's little work to be done in that area.

Is there anything like this not just in New Jersey, but I'm also thinking nationally on a scale like this.

There are some endowed chairs, some analogy, but there was one at Yale in the humanities.

But I think we're like on the edge here.

We are like, you know, Rutgers is like pushing the boundaries and doing things that are really true to diversity, equity and inclusion.

And when we think about the issues and justice issues, LGBTQ folks are part of that conversation.

So this is keeping the population at the forefront and thinking through how this population continues to be discriminated against in our society, obviously, right.

As we see in the state of Florida and other places, but also in more subtle ways and making it a safe space for students and for scholars and for researchers to do their work around this.

Yeah, I'm wondering if that speaks to the timing of this.

What we've seen happen not necessarily in New Jersey but elsewhere in terms of legislation, items that have acted perhaps against the LGBTQ community, did those two things go hand in hand?

The timing of launching this chair ship at Rutgers and the fact that all of that is happening globally and nationally?

Well, certainly James Dougherty, who is the person who has endowed this chair, is a proud gay man like myself.

And we've had many conversations about the realities of LGBTQ people in this country right now, especially trans folks and people in states of Florida.

And in Texas.

And so do I think that probably was an increased motivation to speed this up?

Probably, yes, because we have to be out and upfront and open and discussing these issues and confronting them in real time and modeling it for the rest of the country.

Perry Halkitis with the Rutgers University School of Public Health, the dean there.

Congratulations and thank you so much.

It's my pleasure.

Thank you for having me.