Commencement

Commencement Speaker

Medical anthropologist and physician Paul Farmer is a founding director of Partners In Health, 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 is the Maude and Lillian Presley Professor of Social Medicine in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and an attending physician in infectious diseases and Associate Chief of the Division of Global Health Equity at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) in Boston. Along with his colleagues at BWH, in the Program in Infectious Disease and Social Change at Harvard Medical School, and in Haiti, Peru, Russia, Rwanda, Lesotho, and Malawi, Dr. Farmer has pioneered novel, community-based treatment strategies for AIDS and tuberculosis (including multidrug-resistant tuberculosis). Dr. Farmer and his colleagues have successfully challenged the policymakers and critics who claim that quality health care is impossible to deliver in resource-poor settings. In addition to his clinical work, Dr. Farmer has written extensively about health and human rights, and about the role of social inequalities in determining the distribution and outcomes of infectious diseases. His most recent book is Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor.