President Joe Biden has nominated Atul Gawande (Balliol 1987) to be Assistant Administrator of the Bureau for Global Health at the United States Agency for International Development.
Atul Gawande is the Cyndy and John Fish Distinguished Professor of Surgery at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Samuel O. Thier Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School, and Professor of Health Policy and Management at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Dr Gawande is also founder and chair of Ariadne Labs, a joint centre for health systems innovation at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and of Lifebox, a non-profit organisation making surgery safer globally. He co-founded CIC Health, which operates COVID-19 testing and vaccination in the US, and served as a member of the Biden transition COVID-19 Advisory Board. From 2018 to 2020, he was CEO of Haven, the Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, and JPMorgan Chase health care venture. He previously served as a senior advisor in the Department of Health and Human Services in the Clinton Administration.
In addition, he has been a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine since 1998 and written four books: Complications, Better, The Checklist Manifesto, and Being Mortal. He is the winner of two National Magazine Awards, AcademyHealth’s Impact Award for highest research impact on health care, a MacArthur Fellowship, and the Lewis Thomas Award for writing about science.
Commenting on the White House announcement, Atul Gawande said: ‘I’m honored to be nominated to lead global health development at USAID, including for COVID. With more COVID deaths worldwide in the first half of 2021 than in all of 2020, I’m grateful for the chance to help end this crisis and to re-strengthen public health systems worldwide.’