UNITED NATIONS GIRLS EDUCATION INITIATIVE

Medical anthropologist and physician Paul Farmer has dedicated his life to improving health care for the world's poorest people. In August 2009, Dr. Farmer was appointed by the UN Secretary-General as the Deputy Special Envoy for Haiti. In this capacity, he will support President Clinton and the people of Haiti in the implementing the Government of Haiti’s long term goals and priorities.

Dr. Farmer is a founding director of Partners In Health (PIH, 1987), an international non-profit organization that provides direct health care services and undertakes research and advocacy activities on behalf of those who are sick and living in poverty. Dr. Farmer began his lifelong commitment to Haiti in 1983 when still a student, working with villages in Haiti’s Central Plateau. Over the past twenty years, PIH has expanded operations to ten sites throughout Haiti, as well as nine other countries around the globe. The work has become a model for health care for poor communities worldwide: Dr. Farmer and his colleagues in the U.S. and abroad have pioneered novel community-based treatment strategies that successfully show that quality health care can be delivered in resource-poor settings.

Dr Farmer holds an M.D. and Ph.D. from Harvard University where he is a professor of Social Medicine and the Chair of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, and Chief of the Division of Global Health Equity at Brigham and Women's Hospital. He is a widely published author of numerous books and articles on health and human rights and social inequality. He is the subject of Pulitzer Prize winner Tracy Kidder's bestseller Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World, which chronicles the development of Dr. Farmer's work in Haiti and beyond.

Dr. Farmer is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including the Margaret Mead Award from the American Anthropological Association, the Outstanding International Physician (Nathan Davis) Award from the American Medical Association, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation “Genius Award.” He is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences and has recently been elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.