About the Center

Staff & Affiliates: Jim Yong Kim, MD, PhD, Center Director

Jim Yong Kim holds appointments as François Xavier Bagnoud Professor of Health and Human Rights at the Harvard School of Public Health and Professor of Social Medicine and Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He is chief of the Division of Social Medicine and Health Inequalities at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a major Harvard teaching hospital; director of the François Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights; and chair of the Department of Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School.

Dr. Kim returned to Harvard in December 2005 after a three-year leave of absence at the World Health Organization (WHO). While on leave, Dr. Kim was director of the WHO’s HIV/AIDS department, a post he was appointed to in March 2004 after serving as advisor to the WHO director-general. Dr. Kim oversaw all of WHO’s work related to HIV/AIDS, focusing on initiatives to help developing countries scale up their treatment, prevention, and care programs, including the “3x5” initiative designed to put three million people in developing countries on AIDS treatment by the end of 2005.