Jim Yong Kim, director of the François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH), has accepted the presidency of Dartmouth College.
He will be the first Asian-American president of an Ivy League university, the New York Times reports. The article quotes Kim as saying:
At some point, you have to decide whether you’re going to keep throwing your body at a problem, which is what I’ve always done. You realize that one person can’t do that much. So what I want to do is train an army of leaders to engage with the problems of the world, who will believe the possibilities are limitless, that there’s nothing they can’t do. Being the president of an Ivy League university is an amazing opportunity.
Besides his HSPH appointment, Kim chairs the department of global health and social medicine at Harvard Medical School and heads the division of global health equity at the Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women's Hospital. With Presley professor of social medicine Paul Farmer, he helped found and lead Partners in Health, a nonprofit organization that treats tuberculosis and AIDS patients in countries such as Haiti, Rwanda, and Peru. While on leave from Harvard, Kim has worked for the World Health Organization, overseeing AIDS treatment and prevention programs. He received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2003 and was named one of the world's 100 most influential people by Time magazine in 2006. Kim holds both a medical degree and a Ph.D. in anthropology from Harvard, and a bachelor's degree from Brown University. He is a member of the Institute of Medicine.
Kim will take up his post at Dartmouth in July, according to the official announcement from Dartmouth (featuring a YouTube interview with the future president).
Ed Halderman, chairman of Dartmouth's board of trustees, said Kim "embodies the ideals of learning, innovation, and service that lie at the heart of Dartmouth’s mission," and that he "follows in the long tradition of Dartmouth presidents who have made a significant mark both in higher education and on the world stage."
View Kim's Harvard faculty webpage here; read about his work in this article from the Harvard Magazine archives.
