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 honoured 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 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.
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.
In addition, Gawande has been a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine since 1998.
He is the winner of two National Magazine Awards, Academy Health's Impact Award for highest research impact on health care, a MacArthur Fellowship, and the Lewis Thomas Award for writing about science.
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