The Vision Tachi Yamada Left Us

Tachi Yamada asked people he mentored a version of the same question: How will you use your talents to make the world better? It was never rhetorical. He expected you to act on it. Five years after his passing on Aug. 4, 2021, that question drives the center he helped build, the Center for Global Health Equity at the University of Michigan, and is still the center's clearest inheritance from the vision he spent a lifetime pursuing. 

Tachi was exceptionally well positioned to found a university center devoted to health equity. His career spanned the highest levels of medicine, industry, and philanthropy, where he became known for creating, cultivating, and connecting across each of those worlds: chief of gastroenterology and chair of internal medicine at Michigan, then chair of research and development at GlaxoSmithKline, then president of the Global Health Program at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, then chief medical and scientific officer at Takeda. 

The honor he and his wife, Leslie, chose to leave behind at Michigan was an idea: that where a person is born should not determine whether they get to live a healthy life. That idea became the Center for Global Health Equity. 

Tachi and Leslie's founding gift, and a second that followed, secured that idea and protected the people who carry it forward at Michigan and beyond. But what has lasted longest is something they gave that wasn't financial: a definition of what equity actually asks of an institution. Not charity. Not a rescue mission run from Ann Arbor. A genuine partnership with researchers, clinicians and communities around the world built on the premise that expertise and leadership already exist in those places and simply need investment, not instruction. 

That premise held as much for the people inside CGHE as for the partners outside it. Those who worked alongside Tachi remember, above all, how he treated the people he mentored. He had a habit of telling junior colleagues, often in the moments they most needed to hear it, that he would not let them fail. It was not a platitude. That promise lives on through the people he mentored and the culture they helped create at CGHE. 

He did not build it alone. From the beginning, Leslie was a partner in building the vision that became CGHE. She shared Tachi's belief that lasting change comes through partnership, and she has remained an active steward of that vision ever since, keeping it a driving force in the center's programming. His children, including his son Takao, have stayed closely connected to the center as well. As Takao reflected after his father’s passing, Tachi was simply “a person who did things to help people.” For Tachi, the best way to do that was not through charity but by investing in people, institutions, and partnerships that could endure. The center's investment in early- and mid-career faculty from low- and middle-income countries, its insistence on co-created research, and its trust-based partnerships abroad all reflect principles Tachi championed long before "health equity" was common language in global health. 

This anniversary is not a measure of what CGHE has proven. It is a chance to recommit, deliberately, to what Tachi intended: to keep asking, as he did throughout his career, not only what the center is building, but who it is building it with. Five years later, that legacy is measured by how CGHE builds: through partnership, trust, and the belief that those closest to the challenges are also closest to the solutions.