Vivek Murthy, nominee for Surgeon General of the United States, founder of Doctors for America and a Harvard Medical School instructor in medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Brigham and Women’s Faulkner Hospital, will be the Harvard Medical School and Harvard School of Dental Medicine Class Day speaker on May 29, 2014. Each year, members of the graduating classes of the two schools nominate candidates for the position and vote to select the speaker.
President Barack Obama nominated Murthy to become the 19th Surgeon General of the United States in November. Murthy’s nomination is stalled in the Senate.
If his nomination for Surgeon General is approved, Murthy will assume the role of lead spokesperson on all national public health matters and will lead the U.S. Public Health Service Commission.
Murthy, 36, is president of Doctors for America, a position he has held since he co-founded the organization in 2009. Doctors for America is a national organization of more than 16,000 physicians and medical students from every state who are collaborating in an effort to improve health care in U.S. communities.
In 2007, Murthy co-founded TrialNetworks, a platform that uses cloud-based technology to optimize operations for pharmaceutical clinical trials. In 1995, he co-founded VISIONS Worldwide, a nonprofit focused on HIV/AIDS education in India and the United States. He served as president of VISIONS Worldwide from 1995 to 2000 and as chairman from 2000 to 2003.
In January 2011, Obama appointed Murthy to serve as a member of the Advisory Group on Prevention, Health Promotion, and Integrative and Public Health, a panel created by the Affordable Care Act.
Murthy, who received a B.A. from Harvard University and an M.D. from Yale School of Medicine, as well as an M.B.A. from Yale, has been an instructor at HMS and a hospitalist at Brigham and Women’s since 2006, after completing his residency in internal medicine at the hospital.
