- Company
- Ariadne Labs
- Role
- Founder & Chairman
- Est. Net Worth
- $5 Million (Est.)
- Stage
- Emerging
- Industry
- Healthcare
Atul Gawande
Founder & Chairman at Ariadne Labs
About
Dr. Atul Gawande is a surgeon, public health researcher, and bestselling author who founded Ariadne Labs, a joint center for health systems innovation at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard. He served as the U.S. Assistant Administrator for Global Health at USAID and previously led Haven, the Amazon-Berkshire-JPMorgan healthcare venture. His books and New Yorker writing have shaped how millions think about medicine.
Current Company
Ariadne Labs — Founder & Chairman
The Surgeon Who Changed How We Think About Medicine
Dr. Atul Gawande is a practicing surgeon at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston and a professor at Harvard, but his influence extends far beyond the operating room. Through bestselling books and regular writing for The New Yorker, Gawande has shaped how millions of people — including doctors, policymakers, and patients — understand the complexity of modern medicine, the importance of checklists in surgery, and the moral questions around end-of-life care.
Gawande founded Ariadne Labs, a joint center for health systems innovation, to develop and implement scalable solutions for better healthcare delivery worldwide. The lab's Safe Surgery Checklist, adopted by the WHO, has been used in operating rooms in over 100 countries and has been shown to significantly reduce surgical complications and deaths.
From Government Service to Global Health Impact
Atul Gawande served as CEO of Haven, the ambitious healthcare venture founded by Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, and JPMorgan Chase, and later as the U.S. Assistant Administrator for Global Health at USAID, overseeing America's international public health programs. His career spans clinical medicine, public health policy, writing, and organizational leadership — a breadth that is virtually unique in modern healthcare.
Gawande's work has consistently focused on a single question: how do we make healthcare better and more reliable at scale? Whether through surgical checklists, organizational reform, or public writing that humanizes the complexity of medicine, he has been one of the most important voices in healthcare innovation for over two decades.