Atul Gawande

Atul Gawande is a surgeon, writer and public health researcher. He was born in Brooklyn to Indian immigrant parents who were both doctors, and he grew up in Athens, Ohio. He studied biology and political science at Stanford, went to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, and earned a medical degree and a master's in public health at Harvard. He also worked on health policy for Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign.

He began to write for Slate during his surgical residency and became a staff writer at The New Yorker in 1998. Complications (2002) and Better (2007) show how doctors learn and how they make mistakes. The Checklist Manifesto (2009) argues that simple checklists cut errors in complex work. It grew out of his work on the World Health Organization's surgical safety checklist.

Being Mortal (2014) argues that medicine treats aging and dying as problems to fix. He says doctors should instead ask patients what matters most to them and help them live by those priorities until the end.

He is a surgeon at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston and a professor at Harvard. From 2022 to January 2025 he led global health at the United States Agency for International Development.