Atul Gawande

Atul Gawande
Assistant Administrator of the United States Agency for International Development for Global Health
In office
January 4, 2022  January 20, 2025
PresidentJoe Biden
Preceded byAlma Golden
Succeeded byTBD
Member of the COVID-19 Advisory Board
In office
November 9, 2020  January 20, 2021
Co-chairsDavid A. Kessler, Vivek Murthy and Marcella Nunez-Smith
Preceded byPosition established
Succeeded byPosition abolished
Personal details
Born (1965-11-05) November 5, 1965
New York City, U.S.
EducationStanford University (BA, BS)
Balliol College, Oxford (MA)
Harvard University (MD, MPH)
Awards
Scientific career
FieldsSurgery, public health, healthcare
InstitutionsHaven Healthcare
Harvard Medical School
Brigham and Women's Hospital
Website

Atul Atmaram Gawande (born November 5, 1965) is an American surgeon, writer, and public health researcher. He practices general and endocrine surgery at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts. He is a professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the Samuel O. Thier Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School.

In public health, he was chairman of Ariadne Labs, a joint center for health systems innovation, and chairman of Lifebox, a nonprofit that works on reducing deaths in surgery globally. On 20 June 2018, Gawande was named CEO of healthcare venture Haven, owned by Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, and JP Morgan Chase, and stepped down as CEO in May 2020, remaining as executive chairman while the organization sought a new CEO.

He is the author of the books Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science; Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance; The Checklist Manifesto; and Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End.

In November 2020, he was named a member of President-elect Joe Biden's COVID-19 Advisory Board. On 17 December 2021, he was confirmed as Assistant Administrator of the United States Agency for International Development, and was sworn in on 4 January 2022. He left this position on January 20, 2025, when Donald Trump began his second presidential term.