Atul Gawande

Atul Gawande
Atul Gawande
Born	Atul Atmaram Gawande 5 11, 1965
Birthplace	New York City, U.S.
Nationality	American
Occupation	Surgeon, writer, public health researcher, government official
Title	Samuel O. Thier Professor of Surgery, Harvard Medical School; Professor, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
Employer	Brigham and Women's Hospital Harvard Medical School Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
Known for	The Checklist Manifesto, Being Mortal, Complications, Better; surgical safety advocacy; global health leadership
Education	Harvard University (MD, MPH) Balliol College, Oxford (MA) Stanford University (BA, BS)
Awards	MacArthur Fellowship (2006)
Website	[[atulgawande.com atulgawande.com] Official site]

Atul Atmaram Gawande (born November 5, 1965) is an American surgeon, writer, and public health researcher whose career has spanned the operating room, the printed page, and the corridors of government. A practicing general and endocrine surgeon at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, he holds appointments as the Samuel O. Thier Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School and as a professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Gawande is the author of four books — Complications, Better, The Checklist Manifesto, and Being Mortal — that have examined the complexities and failures of modern medicine and reached broad popular audiences. His public health work has included chairing Ariadne Labs, a joint center for health systems innovation, and serving as chairman of Lifebox, a nonprofit organization focused on reducing surgical deaths globally. In the policy arena, he served as a member of President-elect Joe Biden's COVID-19 Advisory Board in 2020 and was subsequently confirmed as Assistant Administrator of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) for Global Health, a position he held from January 2022 to January 2025. A recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, Gawande has been recognized by Foreign Policy magazine as one of the world's top 100 global thinkers and by Time magazine for his influence on health care discourse.

Early Life

Atul Atmaram Gawande was born on November 5, 1965, in New York City. He is of Indian descent; both of his parents were physicians who emigrated from India to the United States. Growing up in a household shaped by medicine, Gawande was exposed from an early age to the practical realities of health care delivery. His family eventually settled in Athens, Ohio, where his parents practiced medicine in a small-town setting, an experience that would later inform his writing about the challenges facing health care systems in communities of varying sizes and resources.

Gawande's upbringing in a medical family instilled in him a deep awareness of both the possibilities and limitations of clinical practice. His parents' careers as immigrant physicians navigating the American health care system provided formative experiences that he would later draw upon in his work as both a surgeon and a public health researcher. These early influences shaped what would become a career-long preoccupation with how systems — not just individual talent or technology — determine health outcomes.

Education

Gawande pursued his undergraduate studies at Stanford University, where he earned both a Bachelor of Arts and a Bachelor of Science degree. He then attended Balliol College, Oxford, as a Rhodes Scholar, where he earned a Master of Arts degree. He returned to the United States to attend Harvard Medical School, from which he received his Doctor of Medicine (MD) degree in 1995. He subsequently earned a Master of Public Health (MPH) degree from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in 1999. This combination of training in the humanities, medicine, and public health policy provided the interdisciplinary foundation that would distinguish his subsequent career. His time at Oxford, in particular, exposed him to the study of philosophy and political science, disciplines that informed his later writing on medical ethics, end-of-life care, and the design of health systems.

Career

Surgery and Academic Medicine

Gawande established his surgical career at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, where he practices general and endocrine surgery. He holds the title of Samuel O. Thier Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School, one of the institution's named professorships. In parallel with his clinical work, he serves as a professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, reflecting his dual commitment to hands-on surgical practice and the broader study of health care systems and policy.

His clinical and academic work has focused on improving the reliability and outcomes of surgical care. This interest led him to found and chair Ariadne Labs, a joint center for health systems innovation affiliated with Brigham and Women's Hospital and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Ariadne Labs develops practical solutions to improve health care delivery at scale, with projects addressing surgical safety, primary care redesign, childbirth safety, and end-of-life care. Gawande also served as chairman of Lifebox, a nonprofit organization dedicated to making surgery safer in low-resource settings around the world, with a particular focus on providing pulse oximeters to operating rooms in developing countries.

Writing Career

Gawande is among the most prominent physician-writers in contemporary American letters. He has been a staff writer for The New Yorker, where his long-form articles on medicine, surgery, and health policy have reached wide audiences and influenced public debate. His writing career has produced four major books, each examining different facets of medical practice and the health care system.

His first book, Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science, explored the uncertainties, errors, and mysteries that pervade even the most routine aspects of surgical care. The book drew on his experiences as a surgical resident to offer an unflinching look at how doctors learn, how mistakes happen, and how medicine contends with its own fallibility.

His second book, Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance, examined the question of what separates adequate medical care from excellent care, investigating the factors — diligence, ingenuity, and systematic thinking — that enable some practitioners and institutions to achieve markedly better outcomes than others.

The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right, published in 2009, became one of Gawande's most influential works. The book argued that simple checklists could dramatically reduce errors and improve outcomes in surgery and other complex fields. It drew on research Gawande conducted in collaboration with the World Health Organization's Safe Surgery Saves Lives initiative, which demonstrated that a basic surgical safety checklist could significantly reduce complications and deaths in operating rooms worldwide. The Checklist Manifesto reached the New York Times Best Sellers list for hardcover nonfiction. In early 2010, Gawande discussed the book and its arguments on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

His fourth book, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End (2014), addressed the medicalization of aging and death, arguing that the medical profession often fails patients at the end of life by pursuing aggressive treatment at the expense of quality of life, dignity, and patient autonomy. The book was widely reviewed; a review in The New York Times examined its arguments about how medicine might better serve the dying. In 2014, the BBC invited Gawande to deliver the prestigious Reith Lectures, in which he explored themes from Being Mortal and his broader work on the future of medicine.

Gawande has also been a featured speaker at TED conferences, where he has presented on topics including surgical safety and health care improvement.

Health Policy and Political Engagement

Gawande's work has engaged directly with national health policy debates. His writing on the cost of health care in the United States attracted significant attention during the debate over the Affordable Care Act. In 2009, The New York Times reported that President Barack Obama had cited Gawande's New Yorker article on health care costs in McAllen, Texas, as required reading for members of his administration, describing it as an essential document in understanding why American health care was so expensive. The article examined why McAllen had some of the highest per-capita health care spending in the country and attributed the disparity not to patient demographics or quality of care but to a culture of overtreatment and profit-driven medical practice.

In January 2010, Gawande discussed health reform and the realities of the American health care system on Democracy Now!.

Haven Healthcare

On June 20, 2018, Gawande was named CEO of Haven Healthcare (originally known as Haven), a health care venture jointly owned by Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, and JPMorgan Chase. The venture was created with the stated goal of improving health care outcomes and reducing costs for the companies' combined workforce of over one million employees. Gawande stepped down as CEO of Haven in May 2020, remaining as executive chairman while the organization sought a new chief executive. Haven ultimately ceased operations in early 2021, having struggled to achieve its ambitious goals of transforming employer-sponsored health care.

COVID-19 Advisory Board

In November 2020, President-elect Joe Biden named Gawande as a member of his COVID-19 Advisory Board, a panel assembled to advise the incoming administration on its response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The board was co-chaired by David A. Kessler, Vivek Murthy, and Marcella Nunez-Smith. Gawande served on the advisory board from November 9, 2020, until January 20, 2021, when the position was abolished upon the inauguration of the Biden administration and the transition to formal government pandemic response structures.

USAID Assistant Administrator

On December 17, 2021, the United States Senate confirmed Gawande as Assistant Administrator of USAID for Global Health. He was sworn in on January 4, 2022. In this role, Gawande oversaw USAID's global health programs, which represented one of the largest portfolios of international health assistance in the world, encompassing programs to combat HIV/AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis, and maternal and child mortality, as well as efforts to strengthen health systems in developing countries.

Gawande served in this position until January 20, 2025, when Donald Trump began his second presidential term. Following his departure from USAID, Gawande became a vocal critic of the Trump administration's subsequent dismantling of USAID and its global health programs. In an April 2025 appearance at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, he described the impact of the administration's actions on global health as "devastating," providing a detailed account of the damage inflicted by the withdrawal of U.S. foreign health assistance.

In November 2025, Gawande continued to draw attention to the consequences of the aid cuts, stating in an interview with Democracy Now! that hundreds of thousands of people had already died as a result of the closure of USAID programs, declaring, "We had the cure for death from malnutrition, and we took it away." He also discussed these issues in a documentary project titled Rovina's Choice, which sought to expose the human toll of the foreign aid cuts. In a November 2025 profile in the Harvard Gazette, Gawande was described as growing "more determined" in his advocacy in the face of what he characterized as a global health crisis created by the withdrawal of American assistance.

In June 2025, Gawande delivered the keynote address at Harvard Alumni Day.

Personal Life

Gawande resides in the Boston area. He has maintained connections to both the academic and clinical worlds throughout his career, continuing to practice surgery at Brigham and Women's Hospital while holding his academic appointments at Harvard. Details of his family life remain largely private, consistent with his preference for focusing public attention on his professional and policy work rather than personal matters.

Recognition

Gawande has received numerous awards and honors for his contributions to medicine, public health, and writing. In 2006, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation awarded him a MacArthur Fellowship, often referred to as a "genius grant," in recognition of his work in surgery and health policy.

In 2010, Foreign Policy magazine named Gawande to its list of the Top 100 Global Thinkers, citing his influence on international discussions of health care delivery and reform. Time magazine has also recognized him for his contributions to health care discourse.

Stanford University has listed Gawande among its accomplished alumni from the School of Humanities and Sciences.

Gawande's selection to deliver the 2014 BBC Reith Lectures placed him in the company of a distinguished lineage of public intellectuals invited to address broad audiences on matters of contemporary significance.

He has also been recognized by the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities.

His profile as a public intellectual has also been shaped by major interview appearances, including on The Daily Show and Democracy Now!, as well as talks at TED conferences. A 2008 interview in Guernica magazine explored his views on the intersection of medicine, ethics, and humanistic inquiry.

Legacy

Gawande's influence extends across several domains. In surgery and patient safety, his advocacy for the use of checklists — based on research demonstrating their effectiveness in reducing surgical complications — has been adopted by hospitals and health systems worldwide. The WHO Surgical Safety Checklist, which his work helped develop and promote, represents one of the most concrete contributions to patient safety in modern surgical practice.

In health policy, his New Yorker article on health care costs in McAllen, Texas, became a touchstone document in the national debate over health care reform during the Obama administration, demonstrating the power of long-form journalism to influence policy at the highest levels.

Through Being Mortal, Gawande contributed to a broader cultural conversation about aging, dying, and the limits of medical intervention, challenging the medical profession to reconsider its approach to end-of-life care and encouraging patients and families to engage more openly with questions of mortality and quality of life.

His tenure at USAID placed him at the center of American global health efforts during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, and his subsequent advocacy against the dismantling of those programs has positioned him as a prominent voice in debates over the role of the United States in international health and development.

Gawande's career — spanning clinical surgery, academic research, popular writing, nonprofit leadership, corporate health ventures, and government service — represents an unusually broad engagement with the challenges of modern health care. His work has consistently returned to the question of how complex systems can be designed and managed to produce better outcomes for patients, whether in an operating room in Boston or a clinic in sub-Saharan Africa.