Atul Gawande

A two-minute checklist, drawn up by a team Gawande led and issued by the World Health Organization in 2008, cut deaths after surgery in hospitals across eight countries. He operates as a general and endocrine surgeon at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, teaches at Harvard, and writes for The New Yorker, where most of his books start life. Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science (2002), a National Book Award finalist, is candid about how much of surgery is judgement made under uncertainty. Being Mortal (2014) moves to the end of life and asks why medicine keeps treating when the patient wants something else. Born in 1965 to two doctors, he ran USAID's global health bureau from 2022 to 2025.