President Joe Biden will nominate Atul Gawande, MD, for assistant administrator of the United States Agency for International Development's Bureau for Global Health, the White House said July 13.
Dr. Gawande, if confirmed by the Senate, would serve at a bureau comprising nine offices that support USAID's global health efforts.
"I'm honored to be nominated to lead global health development at @USAID, including for COVID," Dr. Gawande tweeted. "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."
Dr. Gawande, a surgeon, writer and public health leader, is the Cyndy and John Fish Distinguished Professor of Surgery at Boston-based Brigham and Women's Hospital and a professor at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
He also is 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 Lifebox, a global nonprofit focused on improving surgery and anesthesia safety worldwide.
Additionally, Dr. Gawande co-founded CIC Health, which operates COVID-19 testing and vaccination in the U.S.
He is former CEO of Haven, the healthcare partnership formed by Amazon, JPMorgan Chase and Berkshire Hathway, which has disbanded.