Atul Gawande

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 is executive director 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 June 20, 2018, Gawande was named the 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 has written extensively on medicine and public health for The New Yorker and Slate, and 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. On November 9, 2020, he was named a member of President-elect Joe Biden's COVID-19 Advisory Board. On December 17, 2021, he was confirmed as the Assistant Administrator of the United States Agency for International Development, and he was sworn in on January 4, 2022. Early years and education Gawande was born on November 5, 1965, in Brooklyn, New York, to Marathi Indian immigrants to the United States, both doctors. His family soon moved to Athens, Ohio, where he and his sister grew up, and he graduated from Athens High School in 1983.