Ashish Jha

Ashish Kumar Jha (born December 31, 1970) is an Indian-American general internist physician and academic who served as the White House COVID-19 Response Coordinator from 2022-2023. He has been Dean of the Brown University School of Public Health since 2020. Prior to Brown, he was the K.T. Li Professor of Global Health at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, faculty director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, and a Senior Advisor at Albright Stonebridge Group. Jha is recognized as one of the leading health policy scholars in the nation. Jha's role at Brown University focuses on improving the quality and cost of health care, and on the impact of public health policy. Education and early career Ashish Kumar Jha was born in Pursaulia, Madhubani, Bihar, India, on December 31, 1970. Both of Jha's parents worked as educators. His family moved to Toronto, Canada, in 1979 and to Morris County, New Jersey, USA in 1984. Jha graduated from Boonton High School in Boonton, New Jersey, as the valedictorian of the class of 1988 and the editor in chief of the school's newspaper. He attended Columbia University, where he studied pre-med and economics and was president of Earl Hall's student governing board. Jha graduated from Columbia in 1992 with a B.A. in economics. Jha received his M.D. from Harvard Medical School in 1997 and then trained as a resident in internal medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. He completed a Chief Residency year at UCSF. Between 2001 and 2002, he served as the Inaugural Under Secretary's Special Fellow for Quality and Safety in the Department of Veterans Affairs. Jha returned to Boston in 2002 to complete his fellowship in general medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School.