US President Barack Obama has nominated Dartmouth College President Jim Yong Kim to head the World Bank.
• Kim has an M.D. from Harvard Medical School and a Ph.D. in anthropology from Harvard. He received a coveted MacArthur grant in 2003.
• He was born in 1959 in South Korea, moved with his family to the United States at age 5 and grew up in Muscatine, Iowa. His father, a dentist, taught at the University of Iowa.
• Kim was quarterback of the Muscatine High School football team, and was also class president and valedictorian, ranking top academically in the graduating class.
• He was director of the Department of HIV/AIDS at the World Health Organization and developed a key treatment for a form of drug-resistant tuberculosis while working in Peru in the mid-1990s.
• Kim was executive director of Partners in Health (PIH), which serves impoverished communities in Haiti, Peru, and elsewhere. He co-founded the organization Partners in Health with Paul Farmer, who was a classmate at Harvard Medical School. The work of PIH received wide publicity through the book Mountains Beyond Mountains.