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 was the 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.

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.

Gawande earned a bachelor's degree in biology and political science from Stanford University in 1987.

After graduating, he joined Al Gore's 1988 presidential campaign.

He worked as a health-care researcher for Representative Jim Cooper (D-TN), who was author of a "managed competition" health care proposal for the Conservative Democratic Forum.

As a Rhodes Scholar, he earned an M.A. in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) from Balliol College, Oxford, in 1989.

Gawande entered medical school in 1990 – leaving after two years to become Bill Clinton's healthcare lieutenant during the 1992 campaign.

Gawande later became a senior advisor in the Department of Health and Human Services after Clinton's first inauguration.

He directed one of the three committees of the Clinton administration's Task Force on National Health Care Reform, supervising 75 people and defined the benefits packages for Americans and subsidies and requirements for employers.

But the effort was attacked in the press, and Gawande later described this time in his life as frustrating, saying that "what I'm good at is not the same as what people who are good at leading agencies or running for office are really good at."

He graduated with a Doctor of Medicine from Harvard Medical School in 1995, and earned a Master of Public Health from the Harvard School of Public Health in 1999.

Several articles by Gawande were published in The New Yorker, and he was made a staff writer for that publication in 1998.

In January 1998, Gawande published an article in Slate – "Partial truths in the partial-birth-abortion debate: Every abortion is gross, but the technique is not the issue" – discussing how abortion policy should "hinge on the question of when the fetus first becomes a perceiving being" and "not on techniques at all – or even on when the fetus can survive outside the womb".

Gawande published his first book, Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science, containing revised versions of 14 of his articles for Slate and The New Yorker, in 2002.

It was a National Book Award finalist.

He completed his general surgical residency training, again at Harvard, at the Brigham and Women's Hospital, in 2003.

As an undergraduate, Gawande was a volunteer for Gary Hart's campaign for the presidency of the United States.

His second book, Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance, was released in April 2007.

It discusses three virtues that Gawande considers to be most important for success in medicine: diligence, doing right, and ingenuity.

Gawande led the "Safe surgery saves lives checklist" initiative of the World Health Organization, which saw around 200 medical societies and health ministries collaborating to produce a checklist, which was published in 2008, to be used in operating theaters.

The Lancet welcomed the checklist as "a tangible instrument to promote safety", adding "But the checklist is not an end in itself. Its real value lies in encouraging communication among teams and stimulating further reform to bring a culture of safety to the very centre of patients' care."

Soon after he began his residency, his friend Jacob Weisberg, editor of Slate, asked him to contribute to the online magazine.

A June 2009 New Yorker essay by Gawande compared the health care of two towns in Texas to show why health care was more expensive in one town compared to the other.

Using the town of McAllen, Texas, as an example, it argued that a corporate, profit-maximizing culture (which can provide substantial amounts of unnecessary care) was an important factor in driving up costs, unlike a culture of low-cost high-quality care as provided by the Mayo Clinic and other efficient health systems.

The article "made waves" by highlighting the issue, according to Bryant Furlow in Lancet Oncology.

It was cited by President Barack Obama during Obama's attempt to get health care reform legislation passed by the United States Congress.

According to Senator Ron Wyden, the article "affected [Obama's] thinking dramatically", and was shown to a group of senators by Obama, who effectively said, "This is what we've got to fix."

After reading the New Yorker article, Warren Buffett's long-time business partner Charlie Munger mailed a check to Gawande in the amount of $20,000 as a thank-you to Dr. Gawande for providing something so socially useful.

Gawande returned the check and was subsequently sent a new check for $40,000.

Gawande donated the $40,000 to the Brigham and Women's Hospital Center for Surgery and Public Health, where he had been a resident.

In 2012, he gave the TED talk "How Do We Heal Medicine?"

which has been viewed more than two million times.

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.