Paul Farmer

Paul Farmer

Paul Edward Farmer (born October 26, 1959) is best known for his humanitarian work providing "first world" health care for "third world" people, beginning in Haiti. Co-founder of international social justice and health organization Partners In Health (PIH), he is "the man who would cure the world" as made famous in the award-winning Mountains Beyond Mountains by Pulitzer-prize-winning author Tracy Kidder.

He was appointed as United Nations Secretary-General's Special Adviser for Community-based Medicine and Lessons from Haiti on December 28, 2012.

An American anthropologist and physician, he is currently the Kolokotrones University Professor at Harvard University, formerly the Presley Professor of Medical Anthropology in the Department of Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, an attending physician and Chief of the Division of Global Health Equity at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts. In May 2009 he was named chairman of Harvard Medical School's Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, succeeding Jim Yong Kim, his longtime friend, collaborator, and, as of 2012, President of the World Bank. On December 17, 2010, Harvard University's President, Drew Gilpin Faust, and the President and Fellows of Harvard College, named him a University Professor, the highest honor that the University can bestow on one of its faculty members.

He currently resides in Kigali, Rwanda. He is board certified in Internal Medicine and Infectious Disease. He is editor-in-chief of Health and Human Rights Journal. In May 2009, Farmer was nominated to head the U.S. Agency for International Development, but the nomination was withdrawn. In August 2009, Paul Farmer was named United Nations Deputy Special Envoy to Haiti to assist in improving the economic and social conditions of the Caribbean nation.