Atul 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 has published research studies in areas ranging from surgical technique to U.S. military care for the wounded, to error and performance in medicine.

In addition, Dr. Gawande has had a parallel career in writing and policy. He served as a senior health policy advisor in the Clinton presidential campaign and White House from 1992 to 1993. He has also been a staff writer for the New Yorker magazine since 1998. In 2006, Dr. Gawande became director of the World Health Organization's global campaign to reduce surgical deaths and received a MacArthur Award for his writing and public health work. His book 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 20 languages. 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.