Atul Gawande, MD, MPH

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 advisor 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. He has written three New York Times bestselling books: Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2002 and is published in more than twenty languages; Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance was selected as one of the ten best books of 2007 by Amazon.com; The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right was selected as one of the best books of 2009 by Amazon.com. In 2010, he won a National Magazine Award, AcademyHealth’s Impact Award for highest research impact on health care, and selection by Foreign Policy Magazine and TIME magazine as one of the world’s top 100 influential thinkers.

More on the 2011 Award

• Media Coverage
• Reception Video