Joe Biden to nominate Indian-American surgeon Atul Gawande to senior USAID position

PTI, Jul 14, 2021, 11:02 AM IST

Washington: US President Joe Biden intends to nominate Indian-American surgeon and popular author Atul Gawande to a senior leadership position in the US Agency for International Development (USAID).

According to the White House, Biden intends to nominate Gawande for Assistant Administrator of the Bureau for Global Health, USAID.

Gawande has four New York Times best-selling books to his credit — Complications, Better, The Checklist Manifesto, and Being Mortal.

“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,” Gawande said in a tweet.

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.

He is also founder and chair of Ariadne Labs, a joint center for health systems innovation at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and of Lifebox, a nonprofit organization making surgery safer globally.

During the coronavirus pandemic, he co-founded CIC Health, which operates COVID-19 testing and vaccination nationally, 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.