Jim Yong Kim

Jim Yong Kim (born December 8, 1959), also known as Kim Yong (/金墉), is an American physician and anthropologist who served as the 12th president of the World Bank from 2012 to 2019.

Born in Seoul, South Korea in 1959, Jim Yong Kim immigrated with his family to the U.S. at the age of five and grew up in Muscatine, Iowa.

His father taught dentistry at the University of Iowa, while his mother received her PhD in philosophy.

Kim attended Muscatine High School, where he was valedictorian, class president, and played both quarterback for the football team and point guard on the basketball team.

After a year and a half at the University of Iowa, he transferred to Brown University, where he graduated magna cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts in human biology in 1982.

Kim, Paul Farmer, Todd McCormack, Thomas J. White, and Ophelia Dahl co-founded Partners In Health (PIH) in 1987.

The organization began with radical new, community-focused health care programs in Haiti, which provided treatments based on local needs and trained community members to implement them.

By the early 1990s, the program in Haiti was serving more than 100,000 people.

It achieved success treating infectious diseases at low cost, spending $150 to $200 to cure tuberculosis patients in their homes, treatment that would have cost $15,000 to $20,000 in a U.S. hospital.

Kim was instrumental in designing treatment protocols and making deals for cheaper, more effective drugs.

He earned an M.D. from Harvard Medical School in 1991, and a PhD in anthropology at Harvard University in 1993.

He was among the first enrollees of Harvard's experimental MD/PhD program in the social sciences.

Beginning in 1993, Kim served as a lecturer at Harvard Medical School, eventually holding professorships in medicine, social medicine and human rights.

The PIH model was expanded to Peru in 1994.

By 1998, successful results curing both common and serious ailments prompted the World Health Organization to embrace the model and support the adaptation of community-based care for impoverished communities around the world.

Particular success in treating multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) prompted international organizations to rededicate efforts to the eradication of the disease, and in June 2002, the World Health Organization adopted prescriptions for dealing with the disease that were virtually the same as PIH had used in Peru.

Kim's work with PIH to treat MDR-TB was the first large-scale attempt to treat the disease in a poor country, and the efforts have been replicated in more than 40 countries around the world.

PIH employs more than 18,000 people in 11 countries.

Kim left the organization as executive director in 2003.

Kim left PIH in 2003 to join the World Health Organization (WHO) as an adviser to the director-general.

In March 2004, he was appointed as director of WHO's HIV/AIDS department, after having success creating programs to fight the disease at PIH.

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.

This included an ambitious "3x5 initiative" designed to put three million people in developing countries on AIDS treatment by the end of 2005.

The goal was not met until 2007, but according to the WHO, served to push the treatment strategy for AIDS in Africa further and faster than could have otherwise been hoped.

A global health leader, Kim was formerly the chair of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School and a co-founder and executive director of Partners In Health before serving as the President of Dartmouth College from 2009 to 2012, becoming the first Asian American president of an Ivy League institution.

At the time of his departure in 2009, Kim was chair of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, chief of the Division of Global Health Equity at Brigham and Women's Hospital, and director of the François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights at the Harvard School of Public Health, known internally as "The Four Pillars" a term and concept taken from his earlier WHO work with HIV/AIDS (the 3x5 program).

During his time at Harvard, Kim published numerous articles for leading academic and scientific journals, including the New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, Science, and others; and contributed to several books.

An expert on tuberculosis, Kim also chaired or served on a number of committees on international TB policy.

In March 2009, Kim was named the 17th president of Dartmouth College, becoming the first Asian-American president of an Ivy League institution.

He oversaw the development of several innovative programs at Dartmouth, utilizing his past experience in health care and international affairs.

In January 2010, Kim helped partner Dartmouth students and faculty with Partners In Health and other organizations to respond to the devastating earthquake in Haiti, forming the Dartmouth Haiti Response.

The initiative resulted in over $1 million in donations, the delivery of 18 tons of medical supplies and 25 volunteer medical professionals to Haiti, as well as hundreds of student volunteers contributing on campus.

In April 2010, Kim launched the National College Health Improvement Project (NCHIP), which convenes a number of expert institutions to develop quantitative methods to address student health issues.

In May 2010, Kim helped secure a $35 million anonymous grant to establish the Dartmouth Center for Health Care Delivery Science.

The Center creates a groundbreaking new field of graduate study, fostering international collaboration between researchers and medical practitioners to design, implement, and scale new models of high-quality low-cost care.

The project launched its inaugural program, an effort to address binge drinking, in April 2011.

As of 2012, the program has treated more than 7 million Africans with HIV.

In 2012, following considerable concern and an extended effort by Kim to address sexual violence on campus, Dartmouth adopted a new campus-wide initiative to educate students on the importance of bystander intervention in sexual assault cases as part of a larger Sexual Assault Awareness Program.

Kim was named the world's 50th most powerful person by Forbes Magazine's List of The World's Most Powerful People in 2013.

Kim's work with Partners in Health is documented in the 2017 film Bending the Arc.