Facing new public health challenges such as changing disease profiles, environmental change, increasing chronic non-communicable diseases and an aging population, Chinese professionals are not able to meet today’s public health challenges in China. This four-year project aims to upgrade China’s public health professional education through a pilot program implemented at Zhejiang University. The pilot program will increase the current seven-year medicine program to nine years and will confer both MPH and MD degrees upon graduation. First-year tasks include a thorough study of international and domestic experience on public health professional education, forming a core program team to develop the program and recruit faculty that will allow implementation of the program at Zhejiang with 20 students in the second year of the project. The program hopes to gradually increase to 60 graduates per year by 2014 and establish an innovative model for MPH training in China. Comparative and follow-up studies on the quality of the graduates will be used to evaluate the program, while workshops and publications, including a final report for the Ministry of Education and Ministry of Health, will be used for dissemination. The principal investigator for this project is Professor and Dean Ba Denian. The co-investigators are Professor Yu Hai and Associate Professor Xe Xujun.