Atul Atmaram Gawande (born 5 November 1965) is an American surgeon, writer and public health leader. His essays and books, among them The Checklist Manifesto and Being Mortal, have made him one of the most widely read doctors of his time, and the simple surgical safety checklist he helped devise for the World Health Organization is used in operating theatres around the world.
Quick Facts
| Full name | Atul Atmaram Gawande |
| Born | 5 November 1965, Brooklyn, New York, United States |
| Age | 60 |
| Nationality | American |
| Indian roots | Father from Uti village, Maharashtra; mother from Gujarat |
| Education | Stanford University (B.S., 1987); Balliol College, Oxford (Rhodes Scholar, 1989); Harvard Medical School (M.D., 1995); Harvard School of Public Health (M.P.H., 1999) |
| Occupation | Surgeon, writer, public health researcher |
| Notable works | Complications, Better, The Checklist Manifesto, Being Mortal |
| Honours | MacArthur Fellowship (2006) |
| Spouse | Kathleen Hobson |
| Children | 3 |
Early Life
He was born in Brooklyn to two doctors who had emigrated from India. His father, Atmaram, a urologist, came from a farming family in the village of Uti in Maharashtra; his mother, Sushila, a paediatrician, was from Gujarat. The family settled in the small town of Athens, Ohio, where he grew up.
Education
He studied biology and political science at Stanford and philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. He began at Harvard Medical School, left to work on Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign and then as a health policy adviser in the administration, and returned to finish his degree in 1995.
Career
Surgeon
He trained and then practised as a general and endocrine surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, and is a professor at Harvard’s medical and public health schools.
Writer
While still a surgical resident he began writing for the online magazine Slate and then for The New Yorker, where he has been a staff writer since 1998. His subject is how medicine actually works and fails.
- Complications (2002): a young surgeon’s account of uncertainty and error
- Better (2007): on diligence and performance in medicine
- The Checklist Manifesto (2009): how simple checklists prevent disaster in complex work
- Being Mortal (2014): on ageing, dying and what medicine should do at the end of life, drawing on his own father’s death
A 2009 article of his comparing health care costs in two Texas towns was said to have been required reading in President Obama’s White House.
The checklist
Leading a World Health Organization project, he and his colleagues drew up a nineteen-item checklist to be read aloud before, during and after an operation. A trial in eight hospitals in rich and poor countries, published in 2009, found that it cut deaths and complications by more than a third.
Institutions
- **Ariadne Labs:** a research centre for health systems innovation, which he founded in 2012
- **Lifebox:** a charity making surgery safer in poor countries
- **Haven:** in 2018 he was chosen to lead a health care venture set up by Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase; he stepped down in 2020 and it closed soon after
Government
He served on President-elect Biden’s Covid-19 advisory board. From January 2022 to January 2025 he was Assistant Administrator for Global Health at the US Agency for International Development.
Personal Life
He married Kathleen Hobson, whom he met at Stanford; they have three children. He delivered the BBC’s Reith Lectures in 2014, part of them from New Delhi. His father used his savings to found a college in his home village, a story Gawande tells in Being Mortal.
Featured image: Official portrait of Atul Gawande at USAID, December 2022. Photo by the US Agency for International Development, in the public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
