HMS, HSPH Professor Kim named Dartmouth president

Jim Yong Kim, tireless advocate for bringing Western standards of health care to the world’s poor and a professor of medicine and of public health at Harvard, has been named the 17th president of Dartmouth College.

Kim, whose appointment was announced Monday (March 2) at Dartmouth’s New Hampshire campus, is known globally for his work as a co-founder of the nonprofit Partners In Health, which works to improve health care in some of the world’s poorest nations, including Haiti, Peru, Lesotho, and Rwanda.

In the mid-1990s, Kim defied prevailing public health wisdom in the slums of Peru by successfully treating multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis, a disease thought to be too difficult to treat effectively in a poor setting.

Years later, as an official at the World Health Organization (WHO), Kim oversaw WHO’s massive effort to bring antiretroviral drugs to the world’s poor, again defying conventional wisdom that the treatment was too complex and health infrastructure too rudimentary for such an effort to succeed. By 2007, 3 million people in the developing world were receiving lifesaving antiretroviral drugs.

Kim, 49, who received both his M.D. and a Ph.D. in anthropology from Harvard, is currently chair of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, director of the François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights at the Harvard School of Public Health, and chief of the Division of Global Health Equity at Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

In announcing his appointment, Ed Haldeman, chair of Dartmouth’s Board of Trustees, said that Kim follows in the footsteps of Dartmouth presidents who have made their mark in higher education and on the world stage.