Atul Gawande

Professor and author

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Atul Gawande, MD, MPH is a renowned surgeon, author, and public health leader whose work explores how humans design and improve systems for better outcomes in complex environments. He is Professor of the Practice of Surgery at Harvard Medical School and holds the John and Cyndy Fish Chair in Surgery at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He also serves as Distinguished Professor in Residence at Ariadne Labs, a joint center for health systems innovation at Brigham and Women’s and the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, which he co-founded and formerly chaired.

From January 2022 to January 2025, he served as Assistant Administrator for Global Health at USAID. Gawande also co-founded Lifebox, a nonprofit organization making surgery and anesthesia safer worldwide. From 2018-2020, he was CEO of Haven, the Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, and JPMorgan Chase healthcare venture.

A longtime staff writer for The New Yorker magazine, Gawande is the author of the best-selling books Complications (a National Book Award finalist), Better, The Checklist Manifesto, and Being Mortal. He is the winner of two National Magazine Awards, AcademyHealth’s Impact Award for highest research impact on healthcare, a MacArthur Fellowship, and the Lewis Thomas Award for writing about science.

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True Ingredients of Successful Leadership

In the operating room, success isn’t about one person but the teamwork behind them. Surgeon Atul Gawande says those lessons under pressure apply far beyond medicine.

The Easiest 100,000 Lives We Can Save

Each year, 2,000,000 people obtain infections in American hospitals, 100,000 of which die. But as the surgeon and New Yorker staff writer’s work demonstrates, these infections are far from inevitable […]

How to Not Punish Hospitals for Good Care

You can tell a system is broken when a prominent children’s hospital devises a system that reduces local asthma cases by 87%, but then has to cancel the program due […]

Checking Our Costliest Errors

The biggest challenge in our world is not lack of knowledge, but an inherent ineptitude at utilizing a vast and unprecedented web of data. From medicine to architecture to finance, […]

Doctor’s Orders: Don’t Stay Alone in a Hospital

If you’re a hospital patient, advises surgeon Atul Gawande, make sure a family member is always with you.

How Malpractice Suits Are Damaging Health

The fear of massive settlement fees has forced doctors to take a number of generally excessive precautions—including unnecessary CT scans that may cause cancer down the road.

A Doctor’s Note: Don’t Treat Friends

How does the dynamic change once a “friend” becomes a “patient”? Can small-talk exist with a person you’ve once cut open, or will they now awkwardly try to call you […]

Treating the Uninsured

St. Vincent’s Hospital, in New York City, loses $1,000,000 a day in caring for the homeless and uninsured. As the doctor and author explains, the question of treating such patients […]

A Doctor’s Penetrating Fear

Imagine the shock of being told for the first time to grab a knife and cut along a dotted line on a patient’s body. Does the fear from this initial […]

Big Think Interview With Atul Gawande

A conversation with the surgeon, Harvard professor, and New Yorker staff writer.

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