Dr. Joyce C. Lashof, who fought for health equity and broke barriers as the first woman to head a state public health department and the first to serve as dean of the School of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley, died on June 4 at an assisted living community in Berkeley. She was 96.

In the 1960s, Dr. Lashof founded a community health center to provide medical care in a low-income section of Chicago. After her appointment as director of the Illinois Department of Public Health in 1973, the year of the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision codifying the constitutional right to abortion,  Dr. Lashof established protocols to provide women access to safe abortion in the state. She also fought discrimination against people with AIDS and protested Apartheid in South Africa.

She championed social justice outside of her professional life as well, taking her family on so many marches for peace and civil rights in the 1960s that they came to view mass protests as “a family outing,” her son, Dan, said.

Toward the end of her life, Dr. Lashof was heartened by the many advances in social justice that had been made over the years. But in recent months, she was aghast to hear that the Supreme Court was considering overturning Roe v. Wade.