Dr. Ashwin Vasan

Dr. Ashwin Vasan is the former Commissioner of the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. He is a primary care physician, epidemiologist, and public health expert with nearly 20 years of experience working to improve social welfare and public policy for marginalized populations in New York City. He has served on the faculty at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health and Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons. He is also an advocate of health equity, once noting, “Medicine has not been immune to the legacy of racism, and it has infected the way we care for minoritized communities across this city and this nation for too long.” In December 2023, he was appointed the James McCune Smith Distinguished Fellow at Meharry Medical College’s School of Global Health, the oldest historically Black medical school in country. He also serves as a Menschel Senior Leadership Fellow at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.