Atul Gawande

Atul Gawande (b. 1965 in Brooklyn, NY) is a general and endocrine surgeon at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, an assistant professor at the Harvard School of Public Health, and an assistant professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School. He has written extensively on medicine and public health for The New Yorker magazine and the online magazine Slate. He has also written  for New England Journal of Medicine. His essays have appeared in The Best American Essays 2002 and The Best American Science Writing 2002. His book, Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science was a National Book Award finalist. In 2006 he was named a MacArthur fellow. His new book, Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance, was released in April 2007.

He is the son of Indian immigrants, both doctors. His father runs a urology practice in Athens, Ohio (where Atul and his sister both grew up), and his mother is a pediatrician. He obtained an undergraduate degree from Stanford University in 1987, was a Rhodes scholar (earning a P.P.E. degree from Balliol College, Oxford in 1989), and later graduated from Harvard Medical School. He also has a Master of Public Health degree from the Harvard School of Public Health.

In the medical field, he is a leading expert on the removal of cancerous endocrine glands. He was also named one of the 20 Most Influential South Asians by Newsweek Magazine. Dr. Gawande lives in Newton, Massachusetts and has three children.