US president Joe Biden nominates two prominent Indian-American doctors to key roles
Washington, Jul 14: US President Joe Biden has nominated a prominent Indian-American physician and a surgeon to serve in key roles in his administration.
West Virginia's former health commissioner Dr Rahul Gupta was nominated on Tuesday as the next director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy.
Atul Gawande, a surgeon and popular author, was nominated for Assistant Administrator of the Bureau for Global Health at the US Agency for International Development.
A practising primary care physician of 25 years, Gupta previously served under two Governors as the Health Commissioner of West Virginia.
As the state's Chief Health Officer, he led the opioid crisis response efforts and launched a number of pioneering public health initiatives, including the Neonatal Abstinence Syndrome Birthscore programme to identify high-risk infants.
Gupta also led the development of the state's Zika action plan and its preparedness efforts during the Ebola Virus Disease Outbreak.
A national and global thought leader and a driver of innovative public policies on health issues, Gupta serves as an advisor to several organizations and task forces on local, national and international public health policy.
The son of an Indian diplomat, Rahul was born in India and grew up in the suburbs of Washington, DC.
At age 21, he completed medical school at the University of Delhi. He earned a master's degree in public health from the University of Alabama-Birmingham and a global master's of business administration degree from the London School of Business and Finance.
Gawande, 55, has four New York Times best-selling books to his credit -- Complications, Better, The Checklist Manifesto, and Being Mortal.
"I'm honoured to be nominated to lead global health development at USAID, including for COVID. With more COVID deaths worldwide in the first half of 2021 than in all of 2020, I'm grateful for the chance to help end this crisis and to re-strengthen public health systems worldwide," Gawande said in a tweet.
Gawande is the Cyndy and John Fish Distinguished Professor of Surgery at Brigham and Women's Hospital, Samuel O Thier Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School, and Professor of Health Policy and Management at Harvard T H Chan School of Public Health.
He is also founder and chair of Ariadne Labs, a joint centre for health systems innovation at Brigham and Women's Hospital and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and of Lifebox, a nonprofit organisation making surgery safer globally.
During the coronavirus pandemic, he co-founded CIC Health, which operates COVID-19 testing and vaccination nationally, and served as a member of the Biden transition COVID-19 Advisory Board.
From 2018 to 2020, he was CEO of Haven, the Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, and JPMorgan Chase health care venture. He previously served as a senior advisor in the Department of Health and Human Services in the Clinton Administration.
In addition, Gawande has been a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine since 1998.
He is the winner of two National Magazine Awards, Academy Health's Impact Award for highest research impact on health care, a MacArthur Fellowship, and the Lewis Thomas Award for writing about science.
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Two injuries, one DNF, a DQ as India end messy World Relays campaign
Gaborone (Botswana) (PTI): Amoj Jacob and Ragul Kumar got injured during the men's 4x400m and 4x100 races respectively as India ended their World Athletics Relays campaign in disappointment on the second day of competitions here on Sunday.
The Indian camp had high hopes of making the 2027 World Championships in the men's 4x400m relay but the team did not finish (DNF) the race as Jacob suffered cramps and pulled out of the race after taking the baton from the first leg runner Dharamveer Choudhary. Rajesh Ramesh and Vishal TK were to run in the third and fourth legs.
Those teams which could not qualify for the 2027 Beijing World Championships by reaching the final round of each of the six relay events on Saturday were given another chance in the second qualification round on Sunday.
The top two teams in each of the two heats (in all six relay events) booked the Beijing ticket on Sunday.
India will now have to try and qualify for the World Championships through the Top Lists of the World Athletics, which is a long and tedious process.
In the men's 4x100m race, third leg runner Ragul Kumar fell down the track after failing to hand over the baton inside the exchange zone to fourth leg runner Gurindervir Singh, which clearly showed the lack of coordination among the runners.
Harsh Santosh Raut and Animesh Kujur ran the first two legs.
The Indian quartet was disqualified and Kumar was seen being taken away from the Field of Play with the help of the volunteers.
It was a comedy of errors in the case of the women's 4x100m race, which saw the baton being dropped during an exchange between first leg runner Tamanna and second runner Nithya Gandhe, though the Indians finished the race in 53.09 seconds.
Gandhe started running quite a distance, but after realising that the baton was not in her hand, she turned and ran back to pick it up.
The only silver-lining for the Indian contingent was the national record time in the mixed 4x100m relay race, though the quartet of Ragul Kumar, Nithya Gandhe, Animesh Kujur and Sneha SS finished sixth in heat number two with a time of 41.35 seconds, bettering the previous national mark of 42.30 seconds set in March in Chandigarh.
The mixed 4x400m relay quartet of Theerthesh P Shetty, Kumari Saloni, Nihal William and Rashdeep Kaur ended at fifth in heat number one with a time of 3 minutes and 19.40 seconds.
On Saturday, all the five Indian relay teams had failed to make it to the respective final rounds and thus missed out on the 2027 World Championships berths.
