Atul A. Gawande, M.D., M.P.H.

Atul Gawande is a general and endocrine surgeon at Brigham and Women's Hospital and the Dana Farber Cancer Institute. He is also Associate Professor in the Department of Surgery at Harvard Medical School and the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard School of Public Health. He became director of the World Health Organization's global campaign to reduce surgical deaths in 2007.

Dr. Gawande served as a senior health policy adviser in the Clinton presidential campaign and White House from 1992 to 1993. He has been a staff writer for the New Yorker magazine since 1998. In 2006, Dr. Gawande received a MacArthur Award for his research and writing. His nonfiction writing has been selected to appear in the annual Best American Essays collection three times and in Best American Science Writing eight of the last nine years. His book Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2002. His most recent book, Better: a Surgeon’s Notes on Performance was a New York Times bestseller and selected as one of the ten best books of 2007 by Amazon.com and the Sunday Times of London.