"One summer, I encountered an undergraduate who had taken his course and asked [her] how she had liked it," Fineberg said. "She looked at me and said simply, 'It changed my life."
A few years before he joined the SPH faculty, Mann was invited by the graduates to give a commencement speech. Due to his belief that health and human rights were inextricably connected, he suggested that the school distribute copies of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights along with the graduates' diplomas.
The tradition continues today and has spread to other schools of public health.
Mann left Harvard in January to once again start up a program; this time, he was to be founding Dean of a public health school at Allegheny University of the Health Sciences.
However, "Allegheny had developed financial problems," Kieffer said, "and it seemed clear to [Mann] that he wouldn't have the opportunities there that he had hoped for."
"He was heading to Geneva to explore other job options," she said.
After those at the Geneva WHO headquarters heard that Mann and his wife, Mary Lou Clements-Mann, an AIDS vaccine researcher at Johns Hopkins, had died in the crash, they gathered to react to the news in the same auditorium where Mann had announced his resignation eight years earlier.
"I will never forget the moment when he walked through those doors at the back of this room, and the entire staff of GPA was there, applauding and making a corridor for him to walk through," said Daniel J.M. Tarantola, an SPH colleague who will soon become an adviser to the new WHO director.
"[They were] leading him away from this organization, which he cherished, and into a new life and new challenges at [SPH]," said Tarantola, who is also SPH lecturer on Population and International Health and acting director of the Bagnoud Center.
Mann's career in international health started in 1975 with a post as an Epidemic Intelligence Service Officer for the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).
He then became a state epidemiologist and assistant director of the health department in New Mexico.
From 1984 to 1986, Mann was the "He really put AIDS on the global agenda whencountries didn't want to deal with AIDS," Kieffersaid. Larry Kessler, executive director of theMassachusetts AIDS Action Committee, describedMann as "a true public servant, friend of thedispossessed, and hero in the worldwide fightagainst AIDS." "Jonathan was among the most effectiveproponents of a worldwide effort to prevent AIDS,"said Fineberg, "explaining over and over that AIDSwas everyone's problem and that the epidemic wouldnot be truly solved anywhere until it was solvedeverywhere." Mann is survived by his mother, Ida Mann, ofNewton; and by his children, Lydia of Boston;Naomi of Washington, D.C.; and Aaron, a PeaceCorps volunteer in Burkina Faso. Other Harvard-affiliated crash victims includePierce J. Gerety, a 1966 Kennedy School graduateand a 1971 Law School graduate. Gerety, aBrooklyn, N.Y. resident, was the director ofAfrican Great Lakes operations for the UnitedNation's High Commissioner of Refugees. Doug W.Fine, a 1990 Business School graduate fromFremont, Calif. who was vice president for digitalimaging and retail sales at the SanDiskCorporation in Sunnyvale, Calif., also died in thecrash.