Medical anthropologist and physician Paul Farmer is the Kolokotrones University Professor, Harvard University; chair of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School; and a founding director of Partners In Health (PIH), 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. Farmer’s work focuses on community-based treatment strategies for infectious diseases in resource-poor settings, health and human rights, and the role of social inequalities in determining disease distribution and outcomes.

Farmer is chief of the Division of Global Health Equity at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) in Boston, and served for 10 years as medical director of a charity hospital, L’Hôpital Bon Sauveur, in rural Haiti. Farmer and his colleagues in the U.S. and abroad have pioneered novel, community-based treatment strategies that demonstrate the delivery of high-quality health care in resource-poor settings. He also is the United Nations Deputy Special Envoy to for Haiti, under Special Envoy Bill Clinton.

Farmer has written extensively on health, human rights, and the consequences of social inequality. His most recent book is Partner to the Poor: A Paul Farmer Reader. Other titles include Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor, The Uses of Haiti, Infections and Inequalities: The Modern Plagues and AIDS and Accusation: Haiti and the Geography of Blame. Tracy Kidder’s book Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, A Man Who Would Cure the World, chronicles the development of Farmer’s work in Haiti and beyond.

Farmer is the recipient of numerous honors, including the Margaret Mead Award from the American Anthropological Association, the Outstanding International Physician (Nathan Davis) Award from the American Medical Association, a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship and, with his PIH colleagues, the Hilton Humanitarian Prize. He is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He holds an M.D. and Ph.D. from Harvard University. . . . short bio

Medical anthropologist and physician Paul Farmer is the Kolokotrones University Professor, Harvard University; chair of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School; and a founding director of Partners In Health (PIH), 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 . . . full bio