About Us

The China Medical Board (CMB) is an independent US foundation that aims to advance health in China and neighboring Asian countries through strengthening medical, nursing, and public health research and education. The China Medical Board is a highly-focused grant-making foundation targeting its support to carefully selected Asian grantees; it thus does not consider unsolicited proposals.

Started in 1914 as the second major program of the Rockefeller Foundation, the CMB in 1928 was endowed as an independent foundation incorporated in New York. The charge to the CMB was to establish and operate the Peking Union Medical College in Beijing which it carried out from 1914 through 1950. After withdrawal from China in 1950, the CMB extended its capacity building work across Asian countries — Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and Taiwan. Since accepting an invitation in 1980 to return to China, the CMB has expanded its support in medical education and research to more than a dozen Chinese medical universities. Currently, the CMB supports work in more than two dozen medical universities in China and in neighboring Asian countries — Mongolia, Thailand, Vietnam, Myanmar, Laos, and Cambodia.

In nearly a century of philanthropy, the CMB has gifted hundreds of millions of dollars in grants and technical support to medical universities across Far East and Southeast Asia. With a current endowment of over $200 million, the CMB spends more than $10 million annually. Based at new headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the CMB has recently opened a new office in Beijing and has begun to deploy a team-based approach to its work in Southeast Asia. Led by a President based in the US, the CMB has over a dozen staff, with about half based in Asia. CMB organizational policies are governed by a Board of Trustees consisting of about 10 members, chaired by Dr. Mary Brown Bullock.

After more than a year of re-examination, the President of the CMB announced in 2008 the launching of a fresh initiative to strengthen scientific excellence in “critical capacities” among Chinese and Asian institutions to address the premier health challenges of the 21st century — equitable access to primary and preventive health services in market-driven economies so that all can access and benefit from the advancement of knowledge. This work entails capacity strengthening in the fields of health policy, health systems, and the associated research and educational activities to advance equity in health in China and Asia.

In China, this new initiative has resulted in the CMB providing support for centers or programs in health policy and systems sciences in some of the major universities in China. At the same time, it has brought together the leading medical universities in China’s nine Western provinces to support improved education and working conditions for serving rural populations. In an alliance with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the CMB launched in 2009 the China Medical Tobacco Initiative which seeks to promote medical leadership in tobacco control. In Southeast Asia, the CMB has built upon its support to medical universities in education and research in medicine, public health, and nursing.

As the CMB moves towards its 100th anniversary in 2014, its Board of Trustees have begun a planning process both to celebrate a century of contributions as well as refine the CMB’s mission and strategies for its second century.