Photo of Jim Yong Kim

Biography of Jim Yong Kim, M.D., Ph.D.

Dr. Jim Yong Kim, an internationally recognized physician and humanitarian and an accomplished educator and anthropologist, will become the 17th president of Dartmouth College on July 1, 2009.

Dr. Kim, 49, has had a profound impact on a wide range of organizations throughout his distinguished career, including, among others, the Harvard Medical School, the World Health Organization and Partners In Health, a non-profit organization that supports health programs in poor communities worldwide. He is widely respected for his leadership in the fight against HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and other diseases.

Dr. Kim’s academic, humanitarian and global health work has earned him widespread recognition. He was awarded a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship in 2003; was named one of America’s 25 “Best Leaders” by US News & World Report in 2005; and was selected as one of TIME magazine’s “100 Most Influential People in the World” in 2006. Dr. Kim is married to Dr. Younsook Lim, a pediatrician at Children’s Hospital Boston. The couple have two young sons.

Experienced and Visionary Leader

Dr. Kim brings to Dartmouth more than two decades of successful leadership experience at leading U.S. and global institutions. He is currently Chair of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School; Chief of the Division of Global Health Equity at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, a major Harvard teaching hospital; and Director of the François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights at the Harvard School of Public Health. He also currently leads a new Harvard University-based initiative in Global Health Delivery designed to discover and widely share knowledge about the effective implementation of health programs in poor communities.

Prior to holding these positions, Dr. Kim was appointed Director of the HIV/AIDS department at the World Health Organization (WHO) in March 2004. He had previously served as Advisor to the WHO Director-General. As the head of WHO’s first major effort to promote treatment for AIDS patients worldwide, Dr. Kim oversaw all of WHO’s work related to HIV/AIDS, focusing on initiatives to help developing countries scale up their treatment, prevention, and care programs.

Dr. Kim also was a founding trustee and the former executive director of Partners In Health, which supports a range of health programs in poor communities in Haiti, Peru, Russia, Rwanda, Lesotho, Malawi and the United States. He co-founded the organization in 1987 with Dr. Paul Farmer and other colleagues while they were students at Harvard Medical School, and he continues to serve on its Board.

Committed and Accomplished Educator

Dr. Kim has been committed to educating young people since his first teaching experience more than 20 years ago at Harvard University. Since that time, he has taught undergraduate and graduate courses in anthropology, social analysis, social medicine, and global health.

Dr. Kim currently holds appointments as Professor of Medicine and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School and as François-Xavier Bagnoud Professor of Health and Human Rights at the Harvard School of Public Health. In 2004, in recognition of his outstanding professional achievements and commitment to service, Dr. Kim was elected to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences – one of the highest honors in the fields of health and medicine.

He has published widely over the past two decades—authoring or co-authoring articles for leading academic and scientific journals, including the New England Journal of Medicine, Lancet and Science, among others. He also has contributed to books on topics ranging from the global impact of drug-resistant tuberculosis to the inequality of medical access for the world’s poor.

Internationally Recognized Humanitarian and Anthropologist

Dr. Kim is renowned for his leadership in the global fight against HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and other diseases that disproportionately affect the world’s poorest people. While at WHO, Dr. Kim led an unprecedented initiative to expand access to HIV/AIDS treatment worldwide. By 2007, the initiative had helped provide lifesaving antiretroviral therapy to more than three million people worldwide and accelerated global efforts to fight other diseases such as tuberculosis and malaria.

While working in Lima, Peru, in the mid-1990s, Dr. Kim helped to develop a treatment program for multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) which was the first large-scale treatment of this disease in a poor country. Dr. Kim also spearheaded efforts that were successful in reducing the price of the drugs used to treat this form of tuberculosis by more than 90 percent. Prior to the efforts of Dr. Kim and Partners In Health in Peru, MDR-TB was a death sentence in developing countries. Today, treatment programs for multidrug-resistant tuberculosis are in place in more than 40 nations around the globe.

♦♦♦

Born in Seoul, Korea in 1959, Jim Yong Kim moved with his family to the United States at the age of five and grew up in Muscatine, Iowa. His father, a dentist, also taught at the University of Iowa, where his mother received her Ph.D. in philosophy. Kim attended Muscatine High School, where he was valedictorian and president of his class and played quarterback for the football team. He graduated magna cum laude with a B.A. from Brown University in 1982. He was awarded an M.D. from Harvard Medical School in 1991, and a Ph.D. from Harvard University, Department of Anthropology, in 1993. He is actively involved in a variety of sports including basketball, volleyball, tennis and golf.